I hated it. Much better from akamai, tornado, kamatera, others.
I gave it a try -- Google offered a free tier vps which was a no brainer. It worked but the ui seemed jank and somewhat confusing. The cost wasn't particularly compelling, so I never deployed. I kept the free tier VPS running for a while to continue evaluation since I value a diversity of services.
However, google charged me like a dollar, and i never saw the charge since i never logged into the webui. I never got an email saying I owe them a dollar so they canceled my GCP access and blacklisted my google account from GCP.
There was a lot of friction here, and the fact that i "feel lucky" I didnt lose my very old gmail account over $1.00 makes me laugh...a very nervous laughter.
I like a lot about google. I cannot depend on google. I use google's AI offering and I am slowly becoming concerned it could affect my legacy email account. Like, everything gets locked and my doctor cannot email me.
You're going to need to buy your own domain and move to a solution that has you being responsible for your own email.
Note that doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself, there are plenty of hosting places that you can just configure with your own domain name details.
I have all of this. You need a google account to use GCP and I used my google account which was created with a gmail invite code shortly after gmail was released.
Some things are still using this email. Hey, I'm not perfect. Sometimes I exceed posted speed limits, too.
Edit: I have to choose a tech giant to get a phone app with decent push notifications as far as I can tell (I haven't scoured the earth for this .... yet) The gmail app is pretty good.
Here are options I can recommend:
Proton
Tuta
Apple (iCloud)
All of these withh be your MX with DMARC/SPF. If you use an android cellphone you'll almost certainly need a google account anyhow. The tuta experience is not as advanced as the others, but is servicable and likely offers better security guarantees than the others. You get a lot of bang for your buck from Proton (personal wireguard tunnel vpn included), and apple is apple.
I've always felt like Google's confusing UI is completely intentional. Making a user feel lost is a great way to make your product seem larger than it really is. If they boiled down their settings and workflows into easy-to-understand screens then your understanding of the entire product could be conceptualized.
Simple example - in the early days of Microsoft Office, every new release would cause office confusion. I learned to say "it's the same product, they just moved things around". My conspiratorial sense was that the confusion was intentional to make users feel lost.
I gave it a try -- Google offered a free tier vps which was a no brainer. It worked but the ui seemed jank and somewhat confusing. The cost wasn't particularly compelling, so I never deployed. I kept the free tier VPS running for a while to continue evaluation since I value a diversity of services.
However, google charged me like a dollar, and i never saw the charge since i never logged into the webui. I never got an email saying I owe them a dollar so they canceled my GCP access and blacklisted my google account from GCP.
There was a lot of friction here, and the fact that i "feel lucky" I didnt lose my very old gmail account over $1.00 makes me laugh...a very nervous laughter.
I like a lot about google. I cannot depend on google. I use google's AI offering and I am slowly becoming concerned it could affect my legacy email account. Like, everything gets locked and my doctor cannot email me.