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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

When I heard "center all their products around one product" I first thought of Gmail.

I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but Gmail is by far the most critical part of my Google experience.

Could this be simply because you're taking their search for granted? Perhaps because I Chrome, I find Google search to be my main way of getting around the internet, both for specific sites and specific queries.

I would say that's accurate.

Maybe it's because I type gmail.com far more often than google.com. In fact, I don't think I ever type google.com.

I probably make a couple dozen searches a day, but only spend around 30 minutes a day in the search engine. On the other hand, 99% of the time I have Gmail running.

I haven't used Gmail in several years so I don't know if it offers anything not offered by other services. Smart, simple to manage email is available in abundance these days.

Google search on the other hand is to me at least the epitome of function. I don't even think about how often I use it but it's many many times per day.

What would you recommend instead of Gmail?

I am just looking for an alternative, but so far, only contender worth evaluating I found is Microsoft's live.com. I want IMAP, then having all my emails online (which means at least 5GB space), and what's crucial to me, grouping emails by conversations so I can read it all at once - most providers fails me here.

I consider mail a critical tool and thus I have no qualms paying money for it. I'm using Exchange Online from Microsoft. I use Outlook so that obviously affects my choice.

DISCLAIMER: I have family working at Microsoft.

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