for all you geniuses downvoting my tldr commment: by far the 2 most popular suggested alternatives from the thread were fastmail and protonmail. fastmail costs money. for us elite hacker types its no biggy but does your mom pay for email? its not a fair competitor when 99% of people think email should just be free. protonmail is free but limits how many emails you can send and caps you at 500MB. also sign up and then try signing up for facebook. better get your ID ready...

edit: to be clear i'm not knocking either option. im just supporting my original point -- that google's recent actions do not threaten its email dominance