Yeah, I thought I'd miss GMail, but I really didn't. I used Google Inbox for a while too and thought I'd miss that, but now I use Spark as my mail client so I don't even miss that either.

It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscriptions every so often. Eventually gmail will receive no more mail I care about and I will remove the forwarding altogether. Its getting there!

That seems like a minor issue in comparison to the issues with google discussed here. I mean, sure, they should honour the lifetime membership, but is it really worth losing sleep over something you paid $15 for 15 years ago (at the time of that message)?

Oh, you're paying for Gmail. Just not in upfront dollars like with Fastmail.

Sure, but the sentiment in this entire discussion is how unreliable googles paid for service is (never mind their free stuff - have you ever tried to get support from google for gmail or other feee service? From what I've heard it's like talking to a wall). I'd rather pay for good service than get unknown service for free.