Why whenever some software service goes down is there somebody chastising everyone for trusting a third party? That's how the world works. I trust the cities to keep the roads open. I trust the province to keep the hospitals staffed. I trust the farmers to produce my food, the engineers to inspect the buildings I'm in, the mechanic to keep my car on the raod, the police to keep my neighbourhood safe. Why is it when all of a sudden it's software, I'm not allowed to put my trust in a third party? I delegate responsibility for things in my life. I don't see stopping that as improving my quality of life.

If you want to maintain your own email server as a hobby, go for it. I have different things I want to do with that time.

You trusting a lot of _well regulated_ industries and government run services is one matter. Blithely grouping them all together at all, let alone comparing them with software, is another thing altogether.

Setting aside the comparison you're trying to make, there are a lot of choices you can make. You can choose to rely on a web app hosted by a third party to secure all of your data and provide you with a consistent service. I think time and time again this is proven to be the most foolish choice, at least if you truly believe the service will continue to be provided. You can also choose to rely on third party services implementing common standards (i.e. POP and IMAP) and allow interchangeable third parties to provide services while your day to day interactions with your computer are managed by software that you run yourself. That software doesn't have to be open source or free. When you have purchased a license tied to a physical installation medium you are still in a better position to control how you choose to use your computer compared to being completely dependent on whatever trustusoksoftware.com is serving up today. Free software is best of all, but isn't the only alternative to web applications.

Anyways, I will come back around and address you on your own terms after all. You can draw parallels between open standards and the regulations governing all the services you claim are nothing more than time savers. You can also draw parallels between the civic duty to vote and take an active interest in the health of your society to the need to push for open standards and free software that respects user rights. Well functioning societies didn't pop up like mushrooms after rain overnight, and they don't continue to work without constant maintenance (not mere delegation of trust to third parties). Software needs to be treated as seriously as everything else you rely on. Personally you can save your time and ignore these issues entirely, but you can't just off hand compare anyone concerned with the current state of software freedom to being a model train builder and laugh it off as a waste of time.