Gmail is good, but for personal email at least FastMail is better.

For example like many people here I have multiple acquired domains — for personal projects, plus I also devised a scheme for my online safety — I prefer for each online account I make to have its own email address.

FastMail does sub-domain aliasing by default, so if you have domain.com, you can make an email alias like me@domain.com and then you can use facebook@me.domain.com, google@me.domain.com, etc.

For one this allows you to keep spam in check and track its source. People say that Gmail's spam filters are really good, but that's not true. Gmail's spam filters are at the same time overly aggressive, with legitimate email ending up in the Spam folder far too often and doesn't do a good job at detecting optimized spam. E.g. when I was on Google Apps, my address was bombarded with email from "SEO specialists" that wanted to "optimize my website for HTML5" or other such crap. This is because I made the mistake of not protecting my domain with PrivacyGuard.

Another reason for unique email addresses are that they make the accounts more secure. If you find the email address that I use for Twitter, you won't necessarily know the email address I use for Facebook. It's like with passwords, the emails I use being in my 1Password (although due to the scheme used I remember them).

FastMail makes this very easy and natural. You can't do it with free Gmail obviously (it does plus aliasing, but that's shit). You can do it by configuring GSuite with complex email routing rules. But then the Gmail client itself will fight you, because you cannot configure a dynamic "From" address.

Also Gmail on mobile is polished and good, but not their website. If you ever find yourself on a device without a configured client on it, then FastMail's web client on mobile actually works and is very good.

And on iOS FastMail has been doing push notifications for some time. Don't know what deal they did with Apple, but you can use iOS's Mail client with push notifications via FastMail. I heard a rumor that iOS 11 finally fixed the Gmail integration to do push notifications. I have two work Gmail accounts on my phone and have seen no such evidence.

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Don't get me wrong, I like Google's products, but their superiority is overblown. I like FastMail more than I like Gmail and I use them both on a daily basis. And Dropbox is superior to Google Drive. Google Drive is simply shit that doesn't work and that I cannot trust with my files.

A lot of people here use Chrome. Well, I'm using Firefox and I think Firefox Quantum is now the superior browser.

I've been an Android user for a long time and I like Android's openness. However Android is really bad at privacy. I simply don't trust applications on Android, unless they are open source or from a very well known brand. Android also doesn't do Caldav and Carddav by default, you have to install apps from the Play store for it. But I find that to be unacceptable.

Google Docs is really good for collaborative editing, the best actually, however their spreadsheets quickly show their limits with big documents.

Google Hangouts is shit, nobody uses it and I'll never forgive them for killing their XMPP service in preference for the current Hangouts.

Google Maps is good, but don't go through Bulgaria with it because the coverage there is piss poor and you'll find yourself on really bad roads in the middle of nowhere. I noticed OpenStreetMaps is better in many parts of Europe.

Overall they fare well in quality, but superior they are not. Except for their search engine.