It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.<p>That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.<p>[1] <a href="https://stalwa.rt" rel="nofollow">https://stalwa.rt</a><p>[2] <a href="https://immich.app" rel="nofollow">https://immich.app</a><p>[3] <a href="https://nextcloud.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nextcloud.com/</a>
I’ve been slowly building my own take on how e-mail should work for me. The complexity of IMAP was frustrating until I realized I don’t like or want the mail readers that use it (and have since started on my own). It’s liberating to see life after Gmail (and Outlook) on the horizon.
> I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself.<p>I agree with most of the article, but not with these statements. The corporations are certainly to be blamed for all the problems stated in this article.<p>While the author may have the luxury to pay for email at $99 a year (even more expensive than Fastmail, which is an expensive service for more than one person), billions of people can’t afford (or don’t want) to pay so much for email. I don’t think we should blame all those people for choosing Gmail (or Yahoo or Outlook or some other “free” service).
I'm not particularly interested in this topic, but man I love Ezra Klein. I've spent so many hours listening to his podcast about all sorts of topics, and while I don't always agree with him on every political issue, he is really very very good at what he does.