What made me switch from Gmail is stories of people losing their entire account overnight with no possible appeal process due to an algorithm deciding there was suspicious activity.
Yeah, pretty much. Anecdata is the bane of everything big. In a country of 330M people, you'll have a horrific murder every week. You have a billion email users, someone's going to have trouble.
You do realize that, realistically, it's probably more likely that Fastmail will fail, or you'll accidentally lose control of your own domain (or have it stolen) than that Google or Microsoft or Yahoo will "lose your account overnight". There are "stories" about startups failing and domain troubles too.
Even if Gmail was 100% reliable it would still make sense to not give them everything about my life. Besides, I also get much needed extra email features out of the change.
Or it's someone saying that happened to themselves, and then they say they never did anything bad with their gmail. Which may or may not be true?
His Google account got flagged for something suspicious, Google had it shut down and without good explanations. He can't even get help through YouTube support and while the old channel remains, the Google account behind it appears disabled today. The only choice he had was to file a request that lead to nowhere and he basically had to start with a new account and channel.
He explained his experience about it in this video here: https://youtu.be/Jn1b3DztWnc?t=83
Was that because of his gmail or Youtube?
Get banned from one google service for whatever reason (and you may never know why), banned from them all.
Incorrect.
Yes, that was, indeed, the only choice he had that was free, and from his living room, but he did have other choices.
Specifically: serving google with proper legal papers from his own lawyers that require responses. That costs google money. The money just keeps adding up and eventually a real person who has decision authority will look closely at the issue and fix the issue.
Assuming, of course, that the banning was improper - which I think we are all stipulating here ...
> Unfortunately, and for reasons that are still unclear, this triggered YouTube's auto-detect system for spam. Hundreds of accounts in Mark's 'community' have been banned. ... Being banned from your YouTube account is one thing; ... However, these fans' Google accounts were banned, meaning they lost access to their emails, ...
The accounts may have eventually been reinstated, but to me it showed a willingness to ban an entire google account from a minor infraction in some individual service, which I was just not comfortable taking the risk on.
Not exactly the same as what you're responding to, but very similar.