With Gmail, privacy is one major concern, because it's no fun knowing that a company which actively pries into your life and none too subtly hates user privacy

With Gmail, privacy is one major concern, because it's no fun knowing that a company which actively pries into your life and none too subtly hates user privacy (at least from itself) is also scanning the content of all your messages. It's downright grotesque in fact, that we as users simply allow such a thing. That aside though, my most pressing problem with Gmail is just how easily it can suddenly lock you out of your account for the most idiotic of reasons that should have easy solutions: Leave your country and need to log in? Suddenly lose a key device and need to log in from a new one? Randomly forget your password and want to go through recovery options? You may just be fucked for a while or permanently under any one of these conditions, all in the name of "protecting your account" (but with no human being to whom you can speak with a bit of common sense). I have had variants of them happen several times and finally said "fuck this". There are other great email options that are much easier to deal with when it comes to accessing an account even under unusual circumstances, and many of them are also much more privacy-friendly, nicely. Google of course tries to insist on 2FA via phone number for supposedly better access security but no thanks. Not only is that a shit option for many reasons, it's also one more tedious step towards more prying and other theatrics.