Yup. There are free ones too (for example, http://domainmx.net/ -- if you are willing to trust any third party, with your data, or can convince everyone emailing you to use encryption) but, even the pay services put us squarely back in the realm of not owning our data. I can use Gmail that way already (as intermediate storage for when my server's not running, and I can use + in addresses to sort incoming mail for local users).

What gets me is that email was one of the first peer-to-peer networks, and 90% of people, including myself, on residential links, are excluded from using it as designed. It seems more wrong to pay to solve a man-made problem. Free webmail is "good enough" if I'm just going to pull my messages offline and use it as a relay...

I remember there being "more internet" on my 28kbps modem... Port 25 and 80 worked from home, SMTP servers didn't reject mail from anyone on a residential ISP. I actually wrote a letter to my ISPs when they started blocking SMTP (yeah, I'm THAT guy)... Their argument was "but spammers," and they wouldn't make an exception for 1 out of a thousand. I even wound up switching providers over it. A year later everyone was doing it and there was no stand left to make. Spam is our "airport security" scarecrow (among others... copyright, porn, etc)... We'll undo the whole thing if we have to.

And so Gmail it is, until Email 2.0 comes around, and is new enough not to be intentionally broken, or I decide to shell out and license the real internet from my oversubscribed ISP that throttles uploads so noone can offer new and interesting services using their networks that might compete with them.

Don't get me started on QoS -- the neutrality killer... (We moan when people throttle BitTorrent, but when it's called QoS, it's "Smart"!)

Behold, de-evolution.

claps the disappointed clap... of the disappointed :o)