Around 20 years or so ago, many did. At least, the ISPs that I used back then certainly did. It wasn't extremely common but it wasn't all that unusual either.
I think what killed these services was a potential for abuse and spam. If you have your name/details attached to an e-mail account, it's super easy for marketers to scrap that, and then spam you if you meet certain criteria.
Centralised services (with all my distaste towards them) prevent that, because they block spammers, and limit access to such data quite nicely.
For a similar reason I think many people stick with gmail - because it's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam much better than any other mailing services. It's also more secure - the Google's budget on maintaining security of their services is far higher than that of any other provider.
It may have been true that Gmail did a much better job than most other services when it first launched but I don't think it's been true for several years now.
Gmail by contrast is only a hosted/cloud solution, and comes with a security solution as part of the service.
I can compare Symantec Security Cloud sitting in front of an Exchange solution to a Gmail solution, and say that hands down Gmail is far and away better with exactly zero phishing emails making it through compared to numerous attacks able to get through Symantec Security Cloud to our Exchange users.
Comparing Exchange to Gmail is like comparing kwiwis to radishes, in my view.
For me, GMail is worse than useless as a spam filter. I don't know if I have especially unusual email or what, but there's so much ends up in the spam bin I need to wade through it all anyway, so it costs me time.
At least, it did. I've given up on it.
As I've said elsewhere[0], as an engineer at heart, a model-maker and problem solver, it's like sandpaper on the brain when people act in ways that mystify me, and for which I have no effective, working model.
Baffled.
I downvoted you because this type of commentary is the least useful thing you can read on HN.
Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account isn't pleased with the spam filter. What was this supposed to achieve? Some long side-thread with people sharing anecdotes about whether or not GMail worked for them? This is the sort of thing that gets made fun of at n-gate.com.
Also:
Please don't comment about the
voting on comments. It never
does any good, and it makes
boring reading.
In contrast to your comment, I've always found the personal experiences of HN users to be incredibly valuable data points, which is why I shared my own. I'll re-evaluate that.
WRT the guidelines, I'm painfully aware of that one. While I appreciate its wisdom, it means that one can never learn from the otherwise anonymous downvotes, so to my mind it's worth taking the risk. In this case I really have learned something.
Again, thank you.
I didn't, because I'm already aware through personal experience that gmail's spam filter is much too strict, consigning legitimate emails to the spam folder despite the fact that any idiot could tell you they were real.
But in general, I don't see why one user's comment that the spam filter is terrible should be viewed as less "useful" than another user's comment that the spam filter is great.
Maybe it is, but no amount of people showing up in the thread asserting that it sucks will make for interesting reading. What would make them interesting is an educated guess about why it's bad.