I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email.
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
If you're going to switch email providers to something like Fastmail, be smart about it and register a custom domain, and pay a little extra to hook it up to your new account (unless Fastmail lets you do it for free).
Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a different company whenever you want (to get the best rate, avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.
You'll still need to have a way to back up your old messages though.
I recommend everyone does this; not just if you switch to fastmail. Having your email identity tied to a particular service provider is a terrible idea. Email will probably be with us until we die; and chances are very high you won't want that particular email service provider for 60 consecutive years.
I used gmail with a custom domain for years before I finally decided to move to fastmail, which made the move pretty painless. That said, when I set it up gsuite with a custom domain was free. I don't think thats the case any more.
And also they have programmable filters (Sieve) and auto-expiry settings for folders (delete mails in this folder after N days unless also in another folder).
There is no other service with feature parity on the UI alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads, newsletters, social media; support for multiple domains (10+) and dozens of aliases per user which you can easily switch between; 30 sec undo after sending an email; send later function; snappy UI that's not from the 90s.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
I think Fastmail ticks all your boxes except the split tab for messages and ads. Not sure about pricing. They’re cheap enough for my use case.
The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders, depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
The spam filter is much better than gmail’s, at least for my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both during a transition period), they both let zero spam through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
are you kidding? Gmail UI is absolutely horrendous! I haven't used it in 4 months, and last week had to go there and was shocked and the mess it is. I guess I'm spoiled by Fastmail, which is actually fast, efficient and clean.
Sounds like I'll have to check out Fastmail :-) However, please bear in mind that if you've got to switch over a whole organisation, you'll have to keep UI friction to a minimum. Users who have used Gmail for almost a decade (our Outlook, for that matter) will be extremely hesitant to be dragged over on to a new service. I guess, a fully featured mail server doing all the work in the background while offering you a front and that looks like OWA, Gmail or $UI would be ideal (pipe-dream, I know, but wouldn't it be great?).
Still, I get what you're saying and I'll look into it.
Do you have any experience with Fastmail for business? Can it be branded and used with different domains and aliases without paying through the nose?
I think Office 365 / Exchange / Outlook has all of that for around 2x the cost. Possibly missing automatic email categorisation, but it does sort into 'focussed' and 'general' buckets.
Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on Windows & Mac.
And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop apps included too.
Yeah I wonder if there would be a tier of Google One that comes with "we won't ban your account". Assuming users/customers are operating in good faith, they cannot get banned even if an automated check flags them.
I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
Sorry, how does paying for Google Workspace prevent you from getting your account locked and not being able to do something about it? I do believe that to login to the admin back-end and to contact support in the first place, you need to log in with your Google account.
Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in converting these things into something of lasting value, supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister. They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that blows literally any other product in existence out of the water. And they just don't bother with anything else anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling, building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just shoot free money at you all day like crazy.
I can understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
I pay $6/month for a single user workspace to get that peace of mind. I don't understand why someone would entrust their digital live to a free service.
You have to understand that this is SINO (service in name only), an offering that is there on paper to satisfy procurement requirements of businesses ("Does this product offer this service with that SLA? If yes, you can buy it. If not, you can't"). That doesn't say anything about the efficacy of this service. In fact you will find that it isn't very useful (I've only had to use it once, but still, useless and frustrating, not much different from talking with GPT3). Many if not most enterprise software vendors have SINO offerings, Microsoft and VMware are just two I experienced personally that provide you with certain 24/7 telephone support lines which will not do anything but waste time until the next morning (if you're lucky) where you might be able to get an escalation. So if you're buying ESXi hoping that VMware might help you fix a pink screen at 2 in the morning, you are mistaken. But management will be able to tell everybody "yes, we have a 30 minute SLA on this with the vendor". Sure.
Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to access the support options anymore if you have real problems or once your account has been locked for whatever reason. There are several services like this out there and I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider locked a whole group of users out of the platform because of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin was overseas). To access the support page you had to login first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the platform back. Cancelled right after.
I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it likely won't, so don't bet on it...
I've had to deal with googles support for Google Apps/GSuite/Google Workspace (or whatever they call it now) and in many cases it's not much better than no support. Often the people you could get on the phone had no overlap with the people that could help you and even when they could help you they had no sense of urgency and some pretty critical issues could take weeks to get a proper answer.
