If your ISP offers you email service and you take advantage of it, you aren't asking it to just be a big dumb pipe. ISPs do nothing of the sort when you get yo

If your ISP offers you email service and you take advantage of it, you aren't asking it to just be a big dumb pipe. ISPs do nothing of the sort when you get your email through third-party providers like gmail, which people obviously do not want to just be a big dumb pipe, since the entire purpose of using gmail is as a email service. Put another way: The person you're replying to was using the term "ISP" loosely, and you're using it very narrowly. There was a time when your ISP was almost always your email provider, and third-party services and self-hosting were extremely rare.