[dvduval]

I see people discussing different alternatives, but for me there are very few viable solutions that would be nearly as good as gmail. And actually I don't like it this way. I hate to use the m word here, but it's kind of monopolistic for me.

And seriously, this is an email period it was invented how many decades ago? It should be easy to have something that works very well with offerings from multiple providers.

As you dig deeper, there are a lot of little details that give Google the advantage. I'm not expert enough to describe all of them in detail, but certainly part of it is we have big players who are dominant on Android and Apple making it difficult for small players to catch up. We also have, as one person pointed out, blacklists and not being easy to get around that with other providers because Google is so dominant in this space too.