You could also get a private E-Mail address that doesn’t scan all your mails to make money out of it. Google tries to enprison you in it’s ecosystem by “facilitating” logins and so on. If you don’t pay with money, you pay with your data.

mailbox.org
posteo.net

Both are great alternatives for only a couple of bucks a month.

And of course, gmail is the only email provider.

(/s)

And here I am, with a firstname@lastname.de address, running my own mail server.

• People sometimes act like this is pure magic
• Some providers only allow popular mail services on signup (fuck those), so I had to set up a GMail address that just redirects to my actual one
• My last name is really hard to spell, so it probably wasn’t the best idea, since I always struggle communicating that address verbally

The pain of running this still beats having to deal with a free provider out there that either spams my inbox with their own BS or just skims through the data to serve me ads.