“That same day I opened a second GMail account so I could have access to services like an email account if need be, [...]”
So, this journalist is in the middle of a horrible experience with Gmail and responds by ... opening another Gmail account, because basically realistically imagining email as something other than Gmail is far too much of a stretch in most people’s minds.
A group of acquaintances had a Facebook group where they shared research and documents. It got deleted and they lost everything. Thrice. I suggested they used something else for document storage each time, but was just ignored or shooed off.
The root cause of the problem is kinda beyond me -- but it's clear that people are unwilling to learn from experience when it comes to these things, and that these free services will continue to behave as they do because there's no downside to doing so.
For about three years the router they sent her would kick off the fifth-oldest DHCP lease and the ISP kept refusing to replace it.
It's a truly fascinating psychological effect.
In the course of this transaction the user may be permitted to read the emails that belong to Alphabet.
Sadly, this seems like a system that can't really be self-hosted. It requires data.
It costs $5/month if you want to use your own domain. I've pretty much stopped using Gmail, etc. and switched totally to them.
Their login 2FA options are as good as Gmails, and I like their mail-rules better (though you have to drop into "power users" mode more than I'd like).