Before gmail you either had hotmail, or you had your ISP's mail provision. Both were poor in comparison, and in different ways -- your ISP meant you were locked

Before gmail you either had hotmail, or you had your ISP's mail provision. Both were poor in comparison, and in different ways -- your ISP meant you were locked in to your ISP for all features, and while clients like eudora were fairly good for the time (I tended to use Pine), gmail was still superior for normal users. The move to multi-device from the late 00s onwards also changed the email landscape. It was no longer acceptable to simply download your email onto a single desktop computer via pop3 and remove from the server, you wanted access to it from everywhere on any device, your home desktop, your laptop, your work desktop, and eventually your phone, which meant storing mail on the server. Personally yes, I use DDG, OSM or apple maps, pay for an email provider hanging off my own domain which comes with a decent enough webmail client as well as imap integration for phones, but that's not normal. In the 00s I used Pine and fetchmail and squirrelmail on linux, with latex and StarOffice and Phoenix/Firebird (and konqueror at one point) rather than Microsoft and IE and hotmail and office, but that wasn't normal, and it's not really a defence against a claim of a monopoly.