Gmail wasn't even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still "Don't Be Evil" and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.

I was under the impression that Google was giving me email out the kindness of their own heart.

Just imagine if they hadn't taken this approach. We might be paying for services and still not getting any privacy.

Within two years of Gmail going viral people were screaming from the tops of any soap box, tree and mountain You are the product!! but as these things always go, very few people paid attention.

Remember when we would climb over 10 office desks to try to snatch an invite to this new "G mail" service with a whole Gig of space?

We were literally begging to have them steal all our personal correspondences, bank statements, etc

And to be fair, they were upfront about it...

The problem now is that 1) Google products turned from innovative to barely functional (with every improvement coming in a soon to be killed new app) and 2) they went from your data to show you ads to profiling people's fart strength

Now that I think of it, thesgiy e free products also differ from inflation ... You get to pay with even more of your privacy for an increasingly shittier product

I don't think paying will solve anything. Some genius will one day just think "but what if we just charged more. But what if we made our service worse so they pay more to restore it. But what if we just merge with even shittier people so they can do all this shitty stuff."

It's never enough, it will never be enough. It's self hosted and open source or barbarism.

Okay back in the Don't Be Evil days, the business model expressed that no human should ever see private data except its owner. Google's business clients could ask Google questions about data analyses involving cross sections of thousands of users, but couldn't ask about individuals. Also you could tell Google to send ads to car owners (though normal Google advertising channels) and they would, and report how many users saw your ads.

Then two things became a problem.

One was internal affairs. Not just Google techs stalking their exes but people stealing databases of names and selling them to information collection orgs. So if you were a debt collector, it was good to have a friend in Google.

Also the PATRIOT act, FBI, DHS, NSA and eventually all of US law enforcement. Judges let them look at the raw Google data, which Google actually resisted with a high-powered legal team, but eventually the judges let law enforcement have at, which is how we have reverse warrants fulfilled by Google today.

In the aughts, Google was supposed to figure out a technological solution, so that the police could tap at the computer or look at the (salted) data all they want and without end user keys which no-one could access, they'd be SOL.

But they did too little too late, and nowadays, enough info on one person could narrow then down to a single human being, which John Oliver demonstrated a couple of years ago by building info kits on everyone in the US Senate, including acts of fraud and illicit affairs.

It was a good idea, and still may be if it's started locked down like Crystal Palace, but Google can't do it anymore.

The problem is that if you run your own email server at home, you get blocked as a spammer these days. Today, to send emails you MUST use one of the big providers, or your email won't get delivered half of the times. One has no alternative but to use these free services.

It was never not creepy and wrong.

NEVER. Just because it's been two decades of people not thinking about it doesn't change that.

People forget how expensive just basic email was until Gmail was released in 2004.

I don't mind paying for email if it's actually private. One advantage I found to using Proton Mail instead of my self hosted email server (other than the obvious convenience, config, maintenance, blocked port 25, IP reputation so you don't end up in spam, etc) is that the more people start to migrate off of Google and onto Proton, the more emails between Proton users will be E2E encrypted by default, so it's one of those "the more users, the better" kinda things.

Same with Tuta. Even though emails between a Proton and Tuta user aren't E2E, it's still a net benefit for everyone if more people switch to these private solutions.

We were warned, too.

in 2017, Google finally caved. That year, the company announced that regular Gmail users’ emails would no longer be scanned for ad personalization (paid enterprise Gmail accounts already had this treatment).

Wut