| A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. The era of Pii as a commodity is coming to a close. The writing is on the wall for this. Once that happens, free email will vanish. Poof. Gone. So will many other "free" online things. This period of most people getting free email is really quite short historically. A decade. (Many people used to get email addresses from their ISP, which were part of their paid plan) I wonder what will happen when gmail goes paid. It's going to happen, and I expect so regionally (eg, not the EU zone or some such) within 5 years. A lot of people depend upon said free email, and as much as I dislike Google, they have absolutely zero obligation to give anything away. They've spent the last few years moving classes of accounts to paid. They've been closing down accounts which seem dormant. Soon... a year maybe?, I think we'll see some sort of precursor change. A reduction of storage for free accounts, or number of emails you can send, or something. |
I do agree from a long perspective free email has been somewhat short. But I'm not sure about scoping it to just a decade. It was easy to get a Gmail account in 2004, that's close to 20 years ago. And Gmail wasn't even the first free email host, loads of people used other free email services like Yahoo (1997), Hotmail (1996), Lycos (1997), and others. 1996-2024 is 28 years, close to three decades.