Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users?
Don't mistake non-paying for no-profit. Those users don't pay cash but they do give google lots of personal data and ad-clicks that makes google money. I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads.
If google loses "non-paying" customers because of performance issues or outages that they don't know about because there's no effective way to contact them, they also lose money just like a company with paying customers.
I put together my own mail server on Linode a while back, after getting frustrated with Gmail's ridiculously limited filtering and tagging.
I use RoundCube webmail, Dovecot, Postfix, managesieve, SpamAssassin, and a few custom hacks. It works great. Gmail used to have the added annoyance of making Firefox unusably slow if it was open for hours at a time; I now can have my mailbox open for days at a time with no browser performance hit. I can make filters as simple or complex as I want.
But then there are people that have to work a lot and don't want to care.
Ironically, the main product i am working on is enterprise mail solutions. I could deploy somethign at home or in anotehr datacenter.. but even the time for the setup is too much time to bother with. So in the end, i use gmail for private stuff and our corporate mail system for business.
If i'd have the time to setup the toolchain you mentioned including custom hacks, i'd rather go outside or meet friends, for sure. Or work on some other projects..
ah, yes, and when your mail server goes down for a couple hours? that's a lot of fun.
i've managed my own mail servers from ~2000 to 2008, when it practically became a full time job. i use gmail primarily for (1) the spam filter and (2) not having to worry about downtime.
[edit: and on another note, roundcube development is PAINFULLY slow...]
Once I got the basic configuration and initial stuff down, the mail server's uptime has been ... hmm. Pretty damn close to 100% I think. I think there was an outage a bit back, but that one was my fault. I dicked up one of the databases or something.
On the flip side, I never have to worry about missing email. Like, for example, the time (yesterday) that I tried to send code samples from a WP exploit that did a neat job of turning the web server into an IRC-controlled zombie via a fun little Perl script. The person I was sending them to had a Gmail address.
Guess who never received the files? (And wasn't notified, either...)
Don't mistake non-paying for no-profit. Those users don't pay cash but they do give google lots of personal data and ad-clicks that makes google money. I would personally rather pay a fee and keep my data private and not see ads.
If google loses "non-paying" customers because of performance issues or outages that they don't know about because there's no effective way to contact them, they also lose money just like a company with paying customers.