I can switch search engines, but I can't tell other people to go off Gmail. Email used to work, from its 7-bit days onward. It was one standard thing that you could rely on in the ever changing mess of messaging web apps and proprietary lock-ins. And now it's increasingly broken. I hope people realize that if they don't get a reply, perhaps it's because some machine somewhere decided for them that they don't need to know about it.