Gmail is not shrinking — it remains the world’s most-used email service. But a steady stream of users move off it every year, and the reasons they give cluster around three things: how Google handles the data in their inbox, how the storage quota works, and how much the inbox itself has been taken over by ads and AI features. Here is what is actually true about each.
1. What Google does — and does not — do with your mail
In June 2017, Google announced it would stop scanning consumer Gmail content to personalise ads, ending a practice it had used since Gmail launched in 2004. That change is real and has held since.
It is a narrower change than it sounds, though. Google’s own privacy policy still describes automated systems that “analyze your content … to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results … and spam and malware detection.” In practice, that covers spam filtering, inbox categorisation, and the Smart Compose and Smart Reply suggestions Gmail generates as you type. None of that is ad targeting, and Google says it is separate from training generative models like Gemini on private messages — but it means the claim “Google doesn’t read your email” is only true for one specific purpose (ads), not for all processing. Standard Gmail is also not end-to-end encrypted: Google holds the keys and can access message content when required to, including in response to legal requests.
2. The storage quota is shared, and it is easy to hit
Every free Google Account gets 15 GB, and that quota is shared across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos — it is one pool, not three separate ones. For the many Android users with automatic photo backup turned on, the quota commonly fills from the Photos side, and Gmail stops sending or receiving mail as a result, even though the inbox itself is nearly empty.
Google One’s 100 GB tier currently runs about $1.99/€1.99 per month, and higher tiers scale up from there. There’s a lesser-known detail too: Google’s own storage policy states that if an account stays over quota for two years, content across Gmail, Drive, and Photos can be deleted. For most people the fix is just paying for more space — but it is worth knowing that “free” comes with a shared, capped allocation by design.
3. The inbox includes ads and algorithmic sorting by default
The Promotions tab, sponsored messages, and Gmail’s automatic categorisation are default behaviour, not something you opted into. The categorisation is not perfect — it occasionally misfiles a legitimate message as promotional or spam — and there is no way to fully turn off the underlying ad business model short of paying for Google Workspace, which removes ads but not the smart-features scanning described above. Some users find this an acceptable trade for a free, reliable inbox; others don’t, and that’s the split driving people to look elsewhere.
Where people are going
The privacy-focused alternatives are not interchangeable, and they don’t all make the same trade-offs:
- Proton Mail and Tuta both offer end-to-end / zero-access encryption for stored mail — the provider cannot read message content even under a data request, short of compelling changes at the client level. Tuta additionally encrypts subject lines and calendar data by default; Proton does not encrypt subject lines.
- Fastmail does not offer end-to-end encryption by default. It’s a paid, ad-free, standards-based (IMAP/JMAP) service, but Fastmail itself can technically access stored mail, similar to Gmail in that respect.
All three still mean your mail lives on infrastructure someone else owns and operates, governed by their terms, jurisdiction, and pricing.
Self-hosting is the other option: running your own mail server on a cloud account you control — for example through a managed setup like cripta.to — moves storage and configuration out of a shared multi-tenant platform and onto infrastructure billed and administered by you. It doesn’t remove every third party (you still depend on a cloud provider and a DNS registrar), but it does remove the specific trade-offs above: no shared storage quota tied to unrelated products, no ad-supported business model behind the inbox, and no Promotions-tab sorting you didn’t ask for.