Since its inception two decades ago, Gmail has become a powerhouse of email. It launched alongside April Fool's jokes in 2004, offering an industry-breaking amount of storage per user. It's still one of the best email apps around, but something of the magic of those early years has been lost along the way. Gone is the company that promised to "Do no evil," replaced by a soulless megacorp that the US Department of Justice is currently deciding if it needs to break up into smaller parts. After years of being on the fence, I'm in the process of moving my email needs to a more secure option. I don't want to play Google's games with advertising, storage limits, or other considerations anymore, and I'm willing to pay to get away.

4 It has ads

At least it's not reading my emails to send me ads anymore

I get that Google is, at heart, an advertising company, and every other aspect of its business is there to enable better advertising. Over the years, this has led the company to do some pretty heinous things with the contents of your inbox while you read it, like parsing the email text to find keywords to serve you targeted ads. Yes, you were getting ads based on your private email while you were reading it because Google was reading it, too. The company had been doing this since at least 2004, but the Gmail terms of service didn't explicitly say this was happening until 2014. It took until 2017 for Google to bow to public pressure and stop scraping your inbox for advertising purposes, but by that time, it already had enough information on everyone from other means of tracking that it didn't matter.

The ads in Gmail are still targeted, but they're based on your activity in Search or every other service you've signed in to with Google as a social sign-in if that service has an agreement to share data with Google. At this stage, that's no different from any other advertising company, but I've had enough of it in my inbox. We already get dozens and dozens of companies emailing ad-stuffed messages every day, and putting actual ads in between those in our collective inboxes is terrible. I'd rather pay a nominal fee each month and have a junk-free inbox, or at least, know that if I get junk, it's because I signed up for it.

3 It's not encrypted

Google can still see your emails

Just because Google says it isn't scanning our email inboxes to serve advertising based on those emails doesn't mean it's not scanning our email for other reasons. Some of these are good for the user, like scanning for viruses or automatically scanning the email contents to move obvious spam and phishing attempts to the spam folder. Some of these are helpful if you like the idea of AI learning how you write with Smart Compose, reading your emails, as you write them to learn your phrasing so it can suggest sentences that sound close to the ones you would write.

It's also scanning to pull out package deliveries, flight details, hotel bookings, and more; so that it can add them to your calendar or automatically update you if you want to know where that Amazon package is. And if you ever allowed a third-party app access to your inbox, that company is also scanning your emails. They're supposed only to have access to "commercial emails," but at multiple points, the algorithms used by the third-party companies failed and tagged personal emails as fair game. Emails are encrypted in transit, and presumably when stored on Google's servers, but the company still has the masterkey to decrypt them. And since Google is based in the US, it's subject to any intelligence-gathering requests that would open your inbox.

I'd rather nobody had the ability to read my emails, except me and the people I send them to. That's the second reason I'm moving away from Gmail and going to a paid service that encrypts emails by default with a zero-access model, which means they can't read them even if they want to.

2 It eats up my Google Drive quota

Okay everything eats up my Google Drive quota but email I can't control

At one point, Gmail's storage quota was completely separate from every other Google service. That's not the case anymore; with Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Docs (and every other service) all eating into the storage space, you either get it free or as part of a paid subscription. That combined storage amount runs out really quickly, and the price of cloud storage adds up over time.

Now, out of every Google service that I use, Gmail is the only one for which I'm not solely responsible for adding data. Email comes in daily, hourly, and by the minute from a huge number of companies that I either signed up for emails from or signed up for one that shared my email with multiple other companies as part of the checkbox next to the terms and conditions that nobody reads. Even with clicking on unsubscribe links, using filters, and monthly purges, I still end up near the top of my quota regularly. And once you've gotten a certain volume of emails in your inbox, it's near impossible to delete the ones you don't want while keeping your personal correspondence. It's time for a reset, and a new email address in a new email inbox is the answer for me.

1 Sometimes it loses email

Not often, but once is enough

Email is one of those things that comes with an expectation of it working reliably for however long you have that email provider. It's not a complicated system, and for the longest time, it functioned like digital postcards, with every step of the way able to read the message, but with the message making it to the destination. Now, with emails being scanned for spam protection, some of those messages don't get where they're supposed to be. When that stops a phishing or spam attempt, it's a good thing, but the automated algorithms can be triggered by personal emails as well, and sometimes that leads to important email disappearing. Granted, it doesn't happen that often, but it does, and who among us can say they scan their spam folder daily to make sure the algorithms are playing nice? And that's if they make it to the spam folder, because if the algorithm decides to delete that email, it doesn't even go to your trash folder to be recovered.

Gmail just isn't the same service it was at launch

Breaking up with Gmail is a difficult choice, with so many other services tied to that Gmail address, over the years I've owned it. Or, to be more accurate, borrow it from Google because you don't really own anything on cloud services. The more I think about how my emails have been used to serve me ads, or to train AI models for Smart Compose, the more I don't like going into my inbox. And that's a big issue, because, like all of you, my whole life is in there, from bills to banking to keeping in touch with family and friends. It's impossible to get away from email, but I'm choosing to do it from a provider that keeps my data safe and private.