I’ve had a paid account with Fastmail for probably going on 8 years I’d say. It’s been a fantastically reliable service and the odd (perhaps 3 or 4 times) I’ve needed to reach out to support it’s always prompt and a real conversation.
I had an issue with Fastmail where I accidentally deleted a bunch of emails, and with help from their support I was able to restore them from their backup quickly.
Contrast that to Gmail, where thousands of messages suddenly disappeared from the inbox, and the only support option was a forum with dozens of other users asking for solutions to the same problem.
Wow, that is something
This is not universally the case and the opposite is actually stated in their privacy policy and data retention agreements as it relates to financial transaction information (which likely needs to be retained for tax purposes).
While Google likely pays it safe and complies mostly with CCPA/GDPR 'rights to be forgotten' for the rest of the US, and a good chunk of the world there's no legal requirement outside of the contractual agreements provided in paid Workspaces on when they need to purge this data.
Current privacy policy: https://www.gstatic.com/policies/privacy/pdf/20210204/3jla0x... Data retention policy: https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention
But it's still baffling how Gmails original proposition was that you would always have an archive of all your mail and could search it instantly, yet all these people can't find the email with a license code for an app.
I'm a 2 or 3 year customer, bringing my own domain. Love being able to send and receive from *@mydomain.com for the entry level price ($50/year, I believe). App works great on both Android and iOS and doesn't drain my battery.