Let’s get realistic here shall we? Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that.
The protocol is called IMAP and the client is called <insert-random-email-client-here>. Email is old and just about every email client does its job sufficiently good to achieve what it was made for: writing and sending emails.
With IMAP, everything is even synced across all devices. Gmail is actually the LEAST important thing to use in my opinion. If people are unwilling to sacrifice a relatively unnecessary software like Gmail, I don't see any chance in boycotting products/companies at all.
Their filtering really isn't that smart. It's just so much better than what people were used to with hotmail or yahoo mail. But it's no better than other well setup systems, and in some ways it is worse.
Spamassassin is not as good as Gmail but I still don't want Gmail. I don't mind giving up a bit of confort for political reasons. The same way I don't mind using DuckDuckGo with ixquick (!ix) and startpage (!sp) fallbacks instead of Google. It's a bit less confortable, but I can still find what I need.
The protocol is called IMAP and the client is called <insert-random-email-client-here>. Email is old and just about every email client does its job sufficiently good to achieve what it was made for: writing and sending emails.
With IMAP, everything is even synced across all devices. Gmail is actually the LEAST important thing to use in my opinion. If people are unwilling to sacrifice a relatively unnecessary software like Gmail, I don't see any chance in boycotting products/companies at all.