> I don't see what google and M$ is bringing to the table It depends on which perspective you're using. A company paying staff to host private mail infrastruct

> I don't see what google and M$ is bringing to the table It depends on which perspective you're using. A company paying staff to host private mail infrastructure? Individuals who aren't in a position to take on that workload and/or those who choose just not to? Google and Microsoft are providing fairly effective spam and malware filtering to the masses with options to classify emails using at most a couple clicks. That's pretty much out of the box experience and doesn't involve setting up and training Bayesian filters for months. For the longest time Gmail offered email threads that were more intuitive than implementations found in other email clients with sent messages presented in related correspondence. Although other clients and webmail services seem to do that now as well. Using free services is a trade-off but individuals who choose to partake clearly benefit in some ways.