There is no way Google can scale customer service to be profitable for free services. Gmail at the end of the day is a free service, and you should either (a) pick a different email provider or (b) setup shop yourself if you need that kind of service.
Most of the complaints I've seen about Google's customer-service, ironically, are from people who are paying customers. So it's not that they provide service to people who pay for it, it's that they don't seem to provide service, period.
Is there any software out there that handles spam as well as Gmail's spam filter?
The rest of the features that Gmail offers seem like they'd be hard to replicate as well - I'm talking about the cool stuff like being able to put arbitrary periods in your email address, or adding +whatever to the end of it.
I really like Gmail today, but if there were a way to replicate all the nice things it does on a server I controlled that would be pretty sweet.
That and I can't shake the fear that one day my Google account will be locked for some mysterious reason and I'll be stuck without any of my email until I can figure out how to get it turned back on.
I don't have the advantage of being a blogger, and that seems to be the only reliable way to get customer service from Google.
I recommend using Gmail (ideally, Google Apps for Your Domain) as your primary, and using an IMAP sync tool to back it up to something not owned by Google.
With some a hundred employee accounts in Gmail for the past several years, I'd say it's been more reliable than the local electric company. We've never needed customer service from Google for Gmail.
We're all engineers, but we have better things to do than run email servers. Email is a problem we can happily consider "solved".
The spam filter isn't my favorite. Every time I go into my junk mail folder, I see too many mailing list entries in there, for obviously valid messages. These are all programming mailing lists, and the messages are just regular programming talk.
