>Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google.

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.