They have good value for personal email and projects for personal reasons as well as in situations where a link is not clicked. Personal Reasons: Gmail starts

They have good value for personal email and projects for personal reasons as well as in situations where a link is not clicked. Personal Reasons: Gmail starts sucking? Change email hosts, and all is mostly well with little to no interruption to your email service. Also, they can be good for personal branding. Professional Reasons: A billboard, an ad, a business card. It looks foolish when a company is @gmail.com, for example. There are security reasons as well. I use google apps for my personal email. If Google were to drop IMAP support or enforce terms of service that were unacceptable, I would have the option of easily pointing my MX records to another email host. If I was on @gmail.com, I would have a difficult time switching. For me, <$10/yr is more than worth it.