Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google.
IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.
IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.
I have internet at home through Spectrum, who offers email service. I don't use it, though, because the experience of ISP email, from my memory, was not good. Syncing up new devices with IMAP always took an annoyingly long time and my client would occasionally seem to forget that it had already got the headers for a message. The webmail was also shit. And then the SPAM filtering in Gmail at the time was miles better.
Perhaps things have improved since (this was 15 years ago, so I'd certainly hope so), but what you're remembering here as "the good old days" are etched in my mind as not being so good.
Perhaps it is a mistake to attribute improvements in syncing solely to the existence of a gigantic webmail service run by an online ad services company. There have been vast improvements in computers and networks since then.
What was arguably "good" about the "old days" was a relative absence of third party middlemen trying to make money from online advertising, and investing in surveillance as a "business model".
As for spam filtering, I agree. However I do not think "webmail" hosted by a third party is the final solution to the problems with email. The original SMTP-to-SMTP design used on a LAN overlay performs very well and attracts no spam, for example.