Last time I saw this on HN it was something like an art professor who'd been storing pictures of cherubs or something and it had tripped Google's child-porn detector.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810946</a>
I use fastmail.com for electronic mail, and I gladly pay for it.<p>Marvel at the simplicity: you pay for a service, and the provider's incentive is to serve you!<p>This versus the alternative where you use a "service" provided free of cost, and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions. You give away your privacy; you have no reason to expect support; you are <i>not</i> actually the customer.
It looks like your problem is you discussed your account closure with people who don't work at Google and can't get any information about your account instead of using the official form (<a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2</a>). One of the people you talked to pointed you to the official form. Did you try it? Unless the official form also doesn't work, your conclusion appears invalid.
The absolute lack of customer support for Gmail made me switch to Fastmail a couple of years ago. I use my own domain now, so if I ever become unhappy with Fastmail I'm not locked in.<p>Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying 50 bucks a year.
And what's the alternative?<p>I could use an ISP (or in my case university) email, but I'll lose access to that in the future when I change ISPs (or graduate).<p>I could use <other free email provider>, but they will probably have the same problem, and unless I'm using one of the other giant services (e.g. outlook) are probably more likely to disappear than Google is to randomly ban me.<p>I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me.<p>Instead I would prepare to mitigate the damage of losing access to your account. Have local copies of emails, don't use two factor authentication with one factor being email.
This part I dont get about Google they ban you but don't tell you why. At least they should make a chart of offences of 1-5 and put different offences in the chart according to severity of offence. So when banning you they can say for this number it won't mean much to rest of the world but the person getting banned could probably guess why.
I use <a href="https://posteo.de/en" rel="nofollow">https://posteo.de/en</a> and am very happy so far, it's 1 EUR per month.<p>Features for the curious:<p>- 2 GB email account<p>- 100% green electricity<p>- Saved data can be encrypted data<p>- Two-factor auth<p>- Ad-free<p>- Sign up without personal details<p>I'm not related with them in any way, just a customer. The only con is that you can't use your own domain.
I use Yandex Mail For Domain <a href="https://domain.yandex.com" rel="nofollow">https://domain.yandex.com</a> which is free with the exact same features regular Yandex.Mail has (“unlimited” mailbox size, Yandex.Disk, letters up to 30 MB in size). By default you can create up to 1000 mailboxes per domain but if you state why you need more they can lift the limit. There is DKIM support. They do have one weird restriction though. I have no access to abuse@ and spam@ mailboxes since they use these for spam reports.<p>What's far more interesting is that their tech support actually answers. It may take a day or three but they do talk back.
Backup Emails is easy, just set up auto-forwarder to Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. But losing the Google Account, you won't even able to login some single sign-on services.