[dont__panic]

Well said. In their docs they actually call out this exact issue, and mention that they'd like to improve it in the future, but it would require significant work and that's not necessarily worth it for them.

It would be nice to see a lot of competing small-fry players innovating in the email space. In an ideal world, I could just shop around between mail providers with my domain and pick whichever option provides the best price:features ratio for my needs. I was pretty keen on Proton for a while but they're diving deep in the VPN space, and their approach to encryption makes it nearly impossible to use them with simple mail apps like K9 and Apple Mail.

Much like the browser space, it's not healthy for Google to run a near-monopoly of email. We need a healthy number of alternatives out there so they can't push consumer unfriendly standards and creep more and more advertising into their email product.

[ReverieFish]

There are a couple of players in town, namely MXRoute and Migadu (that I know of). The only thing that keeps me off switching to them is, well, bus factor and support. I was on Proton too, and the encryption finagling is what made me switch to Fastmail. Unfortunately for most people, Google IS the internet.