[Spooky23]

It sounds like email isn't critical for the corner of the universe that you operate in -- good for you.

For lots of people in different roles, email is an essential tool for getting work done. Not everyone has a role that can be readily translated into an API. Business Dev/Sales for example, depends on email to communicate with the various folks that they need to engage in. Whatever those folks do, it ends with the company getting a check, so it's important.

Generally speaking, it is pretty inexpensive to deliver a 99.9% available mailbox with a 100% guarantee of external mail delivery. The fact that Google bungles a conversion from free to paid service so poorly is a sad statement when they are supposed to be a shiny alternative to the traditional Micrsoft messaging stack.

[justincormack]

Bus dev/sales can survive a day without email every now and again (in my experience, far more than a day without a phone system). Everything will resume the next day, sure it pays the bills but a six hour outage is not "mission critical", it wont stop the "check" from arriving (email is not a payment method after all).

I have known large (email dependent) businesses have 2 day outages on the traditional Microsoft mail stack too. There are coping strategies. It is annoying not mission critical.