That's all a bit presumptive and inflammatory for what amounts to pure speculation on the part of the author.
Google stands to lose a lot more from a potential PR disaster for burning former customers who move away from hosting than they do from trying to convert a tiny portion of users to a free mail hosting service.
My own cousin blackholed my gmail because gmail sends so mych spam. I had to ask him to configure an exception just for me.
If you dont want to receive spam use lafn.org. I dont know how one gets an account there but I expect it doesnt cost anything.
If you want a full VPS use http://prgmr.com/ - "we dont assume you are stupid.". Its a hosting service operated by neckbeards for the benefit of their fellow neckbeards.
Quite cheap, I get mine for free because I help them with their marketing.
Sort of off topic, but I saw an ad for prgrmr.com on a Safeway checkout conveyer belt divider in Mountain View, CA On Shoreline road near Google. I was wondering how effective this advertising has been.
I have devoted years to beating a clue about marketing through his pointy skull but then he complains that he has to take contract comouter janitor work to pay his data center.
I expect he shops at that dame Safeway.
The way he needs to market was established in the 1960s by the stanford alumni association but Luke refuses to Read The Fine Manual.
I would like to use prgmr.com because I appreciate the no-nonsense way they seem to do business but (especially with the now-worthless Australian Dollar) they're so much more expensive than DigitalOcean.
If you run your own MDA, you could do a lot worse than to filter incoming mail against https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/; the free tier is extremely broad, and the coverage is excellent -- I get maybe one spam email a week, tops.
I'm also happy with Spamhaus Zen generally, but spam sent via Gmail is one category of email it won't stop, since it only blacklists pure spam sources, and Gmail is obviously a legitimate mailhost. I get a steady trickle of spam from Gmail addresses, mostly SEO-consultant spammers who grabbed my email from the whois info.
Whenever they solicit me I respond immediately with links to my own SEO articles. Of course the very best SEO is for ones own website to go viral at an SEO board.
One enterprising young South Asian was obviously a clueless newbie so I gave my reply a great deal of care. A few hours later he responded with:
"You are my SEO master."
I dontbreally offer SEO consulting but to claim that I do results in lots of Google Juice.
I run a personal mail server there too. I'm very happy with them: I was in the free tier for years, after they acquired the hosting provider I had been using. I recently asked them to start billing and am very happy to be a paying customer.
Google stands to lose a lot more from a potential PR disaster for burning former customers who move away from hosting than they do from trying to convert a tiny portion of users to a free mail hosting service.