Indeed. I'd like to. Except Google also make it nigh impossible for anyone hosting their own email (the original-internet ideal) to get email into gmail reliably enough to be useful. I have my own address on my own domain, but can't rely on it (yes, DKIM and DMARC and SPF are properly set up) not to be marked "spam" for opaque reasons, so gmail remains my "main" address. It's a network-effect problem: once enough people are "captured", then everyone else is forced to join - or else be unable to participate.

It's a collective action problem: you'll have to persuade millions and millions of "normies", who have no idea what's going on, or what internet privacy is, or what's broken about the system, and who don't care to learn, and won't listen to us - or you'll have to impose regulation. Those are the choices. The second seems more possible than the first. Us nerds saying "walk away" is idealistic; we will, and always will, get squished, because the corps have the power and most folks won't (ever) care.

No, not for all types of "dealing with".

If you're dealing with spam originating from Gmail, without any helpful action from Google, that's not really your choice.

If you're dealing with difficulties sending mail to Gmail users, without help from Google, that's also not really your choice.

If vast numbers of other people stopped using Gmail, those problems would mostly go away.

GP Post: > My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

Your post: > Everyone dealing with gmail is doing so because they chose to.

No, it's clear that not everyone dealing with Gmail is doing so because they chose to. Repeating your incorrect statement does not make it correct.

Further, everyone has to deal with its impacts on the email ecosystem as it's practically impossible for somebody who works a 9-5 to run their own mail server that Gmail will deign to not only accept mail from but also successfully deliver it to its intended recipient.

So even if I never use Gmail I still have to deal with replies going to / coming from it.

>Anyone can stop using gmail at any time.

Just going to copy/paste this part of the comment you replied to, because it seems like you may have missed it?

>My company uses gmail so I'm forced to use it.

Not me - it's work mandated.

Not my wife - her school board mandates it.

i think you underestimate the effort for change of the average user with a @gmail.com address.

> Anyone can stop using gmail at any time

True, and applies to many other things as well. Anyone claiming otherwise is shirking responsibility for their own actions. Every single sibling comment here suffers from this.

Arguments in the form of "other people do it, so I must also" are unpersuasive and pathetic.

Except for anyone whose employer requires them to use Google services, since Google Apps (or whatever they call it these days) is a hugely popular offering for central company email/contacts/calendar/office suite. And frankly, it's better than dealing with Outlook and its unrelenting AI slop machine advertising.