Better webmail and calendars exist (I use one of them), but because of Google's control of the entire market, two thirds of users are still on Gmail. That's the monopoly effect: Better products don't win out when one company controls the playing field. And now Google's out to introduce their own proprietary email format to hurt other parties even more.
Interesting. Their control of the market didn't seem to stop me from moving all of my Email out of Gmail recently. I just went and did it. I must have missed that screen where they say, "You can no longer continue exporting your E-mail. We control the playing field, so other services cannot win out!"
Yeah, I think you addressed your own concern there. Why would a consumer who doesn't know how to export mail need something better than Gmail? I'm a power user, and I don't need anything but Gmail, so I can't fathom that there's some unserved email opportunity that consumers would love fulfilled if only they knew about Gmail competitors.
I'm using FastMail, which isn't selfhosted. I have some high hopes for Mailpile though. FastMail's working on an open source standard called JMAP, which has seen some interest from a couple of open source mail projects, and would move labels from being a Gmail-proprietary thing to something openly supported and standardized. Sandstorm.io, where I host my documents, just stated a goal to bring their email support up to par: https://sandstorm.io/news/2018-02-19-http-rewrite-and-more
Email-based startups and open source projects don't seem to move very fast though, likely because due to the Gmail monopoly, they don't get a lot of support.
You can definitely automatically filter email into different folders as it comes in, and they support complex rules. You are specifically asking for weird nonstandard behaviors which cause more problems than they fix.
(For example, when I used Gmail, the "multiple inboxes" feature didn't work well with third party mail apps, because it isn't really multiple inboxes, it's just Gmail sorting the inbox on the fly. I ended up disabling them and adding custom rules into Gmail to sort them into proper folders.)
As the case is FastMail does actually have that feature, I just prefer to use actual rules and folders. ;)
Snooze is, from my understanding, an Inbox feature, not a Gmail feature, and I still fail to see any value. (But maybe as a non-Inbox user I just don't know?) You have read, unread, and pinned/starred functionality, how and why one would hide one's emails from oneself until a later point, I have no idea.
Extracting data from emails automatically is an antifeature, since it's privacy-invasive. I specifically pay FastMail for it not to do things like that to my mail!
But on the opposite end:
* FastMail's interface is faster and cleaner than Gmail's and contains no advertising.
* FastMail's email/calendar service is fully standards compliant, unlike the number of hacks required to interoperate with Gmail's proprietary nonsense. Just yesterday I was reading about this: http://blog.fruux.com/2014/10/16/google-carddav/
* FastMail gives me incredibly fine-grained control over how my mail is handled, including it's spam filtering.
* When I have an issue with FastMail, I can ask for help, and a real human (and one random time, literally the CEO) will respond, and assist me with my problem.
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FWIW, Outlook.com has a pretty nice email client too, and their account management is a lot more mature than Google's (I can change my Microsoft account's email address, something Google remains incapable of to this day, somehow).
Gmail has been around for over a decade, it's the least common denominator now, most email services are at least as good as Gmail.
Mailpile is great. I use it as sort of a webmail for my private email server. But it's not even close to Gmail, and has no calendar, or note taking app (yes, I actually do use Keep).
I don't think FastMail can really compete with G Suite on anything except "not being the leviathan." Which is not nothing! But as a tool, it's just not as good. And Outlook which you mention in the comment below doesn't even have this.
Let's not underestimate Google here. They offer a full productivity suite, an excellent, tight integration with Android, plus Chrome sync for multiple profiles. They're tough competition.
I went looking for a replacement to escape Google, but I'd definitely disagree FastMail is "just not as good". On the contrary, it makes Gmail feel old and poorly maintained in comparison. It's better written software, before you get into the fact that you can get real human support for it.
> Email-based startups and open source
> projects don't seem to move very fast
> though, likely because due to the
> Gmail monopoly, they don't get a
> lot of support.
A great big {{citation needed}} as to your claim of a cause-and-effect relationship between these two statements.
A bit off-topic, but what proper calendar alternatives exist? Although I don't really believe any competition for email exists (though I'd love to be proven wrong with an alternative that can do snoozing), I can't really believe that no such alternative for calendar exists.
It's a lot harder to offer your service for free (80% of "better" here) when you don't run a highly vertically integrated and dominant advertising system.
Which options aren't better than G Suite? Many of Google's antiprivacy features are enabled even if you're paying for their product, and in addition to that, you get an outdated version of Google services that can take months or years before Google supports. Almost everything Google launches won't work with GApps accounts until some point in the future.
I have regularly seen people moving from Google Apps to personal Gmail accounts just because the integration with other Google services is so bad.
It's understandable Google wants it's business customers to have well-tested robust software, but more often then not, the support cycle can leave them excluded for years, with no way to opt in.
Everything else I've tried. Office 365 isn't better. What I could stitch together with OwnCloud wasn't better.
All the important Google tools are in the G Suite. There's Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Photos, and the whole web office suite: Drive, Docs, Sheets. It also works and syncs with Android.
No, they won't. There's people who don't even know that there's something else than GMail. They can't do one click and be at a competitor's site, if they don't know about it. And it doesn't help that their only way of finding out about competitors is through google.com.
