Although I've got a gmail account of which I make frequent use, I generally consider my primary email addresses to be my various "@greghowley.com" email addresses. They're simple syntax, they stick with me if I change email providers, and they are obviously custom to anyone that sees them, which lends a certain pinache.
My first email address in college was Howley_Gre@ccsua.ctstateu.edu, which was anything but easy to remember. And yet somehow I still remember. Since then, I've gone through @snet, @comcast, @hotmail, and @yahoo addresses. But I've had this gmail one for decades now, and I've had my same @greghowley addresses for nearly as long.
Those addresses have gone through a number of changes over the years. At one point, they were just forwarders to gmail, and gmail let me send outgoing email with my @greghowley email address as a reply-to. But then, Google changed their headers and people would receive a FROM field of "so-and-so@greghowley.com, on behalf of so-and-so@gmail.com", necessitating me to change the setup again and spend lots of time in GMail's advanced settings screens.
I've had on-and-off email issues for a while now, but it was only last night when I went to sign up for a Warmachine tournament and never got the automatically-generated email from that site that I realized that some unidentifyable number of emails coming to my @greghowley email accounts were being thrown into an internet black hole by Google.
I did some checking, and found that while some senders were coming in just fine - I still was getting those deal emails from Luna Pizza every week - a lot of emails were just never making it to my inbox. I'll likely never be entirely certain how many of those I've missed.
In response, I immediately cancelled the routing that sent my emails to GMail, installed an email client on my phone, and ran a number of tests to make sure that everything was making it into that inbox correctly from all of my @greghowley email addresses.
Sheesh. What a pain in the ass. I'll likely spend a few weeks evaluating my new email reality before I decide what more I might like to change. Should I set up any other email clients to get the same emails on a non-mobile platform? Archival in this phone-based client won't be in the cloud like gmail, so how will that go? Are these emails I receive on my phone being automatically removed from the server? Easy to check, but I'm not yet doing that.
All I know is, GMail's shitty handling of my various email addresses is going to make it easier if I ever decide to divorce myself from Google. When last I discussed leaving Google back in 2012, my primary concerns were...
I do currently use Google Docs quite a bit, mostly for keeping D&D advantures in the cloud and accesible to the craptop I use to run games. I've been using DuckDuckGo rather than Google's search engine for over ten years. So here's to minimizing reliance rather than quitting the platform entirely.