I understand why people are reluctant to trust a single corporation with so much control over their personal information, particularly when, as they say, the user is as much the product as the customer. I'm generally a big defender of Google but even I am disquieted by their maneuvering around Google+.

However, I also doubt it's possible to build services as sophisticated as GMail on direct payments from users. I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to pay what it would cost to build and run a service like GMail without ads.