It's not just email, it seems like any service is at risk of being ignored through malice or just being too tiny it gets neglected if it doesn't help the walled garden somehow.

At one point I heard a rumor that no human had worked on Google Finance in over a year, simply because nobody was interested. Not their biggest service of course, but still a major site that presumably generates a lot of revenue. If they think that global finance is "too boring" for their amazing engineers then support for everything is liable to be canceled at any moment.