I'm cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It's funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway... there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn't a thing.
It's how I snagged a "firstname.lastname" address. No numbers or anything! All the other people with my exact name out there can fuck off!
And as a bonus you snagged firstnamelastname without realising.
This alone makes Gmail a better service than most providers. All of the similar but different address confusions avoided.
It really should be standard practice.
Oh I know.
There's someone with a variation of my first name (think "Steven" versus "Steve") who absolutely cannot get their shit sorted and gives out my address as theirs all over the place using "longerFirstNameLastname" but fucks it up and uses my address instead. I tried emailing them directly once letting them know, got accused of "hacking their google" and now I just delete some important looking emails like travel reservations and digital gift card redemption things for Xbox.
Yeah I snagged one too; but all the people with that name seem to have made variations of it, and when they give it out, either they forget their own email address or the person they give it to just mishears and simplifies to first name.lastname. Needless to say I receive a lot of junk intended for other people.
A buddy has guy123 and has had it for decades. It's commonly used for fluff email entries and he enjoys seeing the spam people are up to lol.
I have a first and last name email on Gmail and I had some dbag email me telling me if I didn’t hand over the email to him he was going to sign my account up for every spam service he could find also claimed he was going to hack my account but the brute force attempts and phishing emails didn’t work. This was a few years ago and I still get a ton of spam on that account and Google doesn’t have a solution for it so the account just sits there unused. I will take that email to my grave before I let some jackass in the internet get what he wants.