Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is? Perhaps you don't owe it better, but you owe the community better—we should all be posting in a way that protects the container for future discussion. It's fragile, and it's under more pressure than ever these days.
A better way to respond to that one might be by saying something about all the people who can't afford to pay for email, who benefit from the free services we're talking about.
Not that I necessarily agree with the GP commenter, but this doesn't address his point. Things "used to" be this way during a time period with a billion less Internet users, who've come largely from the poorer parts of the developing world. The claim is that a high-quality free email service doesn't matter as much to someone with lots of disposable income in the first world as it does to people who aren't as fortunate.
I don't know what to say. I don't claim to be an expert on what life is like in the developing world, so I'll have to defer to people like missedthecue and yourself to tell me what it's like there.
