But you still use it. I remember the struggle for catching invites and then the magic happened. Never used any other account from that.
I remember quite a few acquaintances saying they would never switch to something like gmail because they wanted to have a 'real' address linked to a 'physical' service, so they used an account provided by their ISP. I wonder how many of them are still with the same ISPs.
Out of inertia. I'm 'decoupled' from GMail interface wise. Unfortunately, everyone knows my GMail address, but it's slowly getting transitioned to my personal domain.
For those interested in checking it out, feel free to use to use the following referral link while doing so.
http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=11413330
Obvious disclaimer: The link above is a referral link. I will benefit if you use it.
*Edit because of no markdown.
Also, since they actually implement IMAP correctly (they are one of the major contributors of the open source Cyrus IMAP server), things like MailTags work[1], whereas they don't on Google Mail.
The only thing that is missing are push notifications (e.g. via ActiveSync), but they are working on an app. In the meanwhile, using pushover is also an option.
They actually have a two month trial, so they're definitely worth trying out.
Many people used Hotmail (originally Hotmail) but many people also used Yahoo Mail (originally Rocketmail), which was generally as good or better.
Unfortunately for those people (eg me), Yahoo Mail is now unusably horrible while the new "Hotmail" is generally as good as Gmail and sometimes better. (The web interface is slower, but if you're concerned about speed then you're not using the web interface.)