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The difference is that email doesn't depend on Google to exist, and leaving Gmail isn't all that bad. They even support email forwarding, so that you wouldn't loose contact with people that only have your old email: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en

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Are you joking or what? I, personally, don't use gmail, that's not the problem. The problem is everyone else does. And have you ever (in last 5 years or so) tried using your personal email server to communicate with them? I'm guessing you have not, because otherwise you would know how painful it is, as Google does everything to make it painful as hell. Large portion of my contact list are gmail users, especially that part of my contact list who I'm not friendly enough with to tolerate continuously ending up in their “Spam” folder. And that's exactly what you do, when you write to gmail from your own private email server — end up in their “Spam” folder, no matter what you do. So if you are ever going to communicate via email with whoever you might call your customer, you are basically forced to use gmail or another large email service which will be whitelisted on other large email services. 2015 is not the year of free Internet.

I have a very different experience, having run my own email server for the past few months with no trouble communicating with many others on Gmail. Is your SMTP server on a blacklist or something?

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