Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I'm Sorry I'm Leaving You

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google&#x27;s retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.<p>That said, there&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;stalwa.rt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stalwa.rt</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;immich.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;immich.app</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextcloud.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextcloud.com&#x2F;</a>

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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.

&gt; 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&#x27;m not particularly interested in this topic, but man I love Ezra Klein. I&#x27;ve spent so many hours listening to his podcast about all sorts of topics, and while I don&#x27;t always agree with him on every political issue, he is really very very good at what he does.