22 years ago to have an email account and to be able to send and to receive emails was something like out of this world. Not everyone had access to internet, or in some cases it was just not affordable.
In 2003 I had dialup connection and it was not cheap. One year later, the cable company launched internet over coaxial cable, I had cable internet with 3 Gb of traffic / month and I was the only one from my block with cable internet.
The email and later, yahoo messenger and msn messenger was for romanians the affordable way to connect with their relatives abroad when the telephone was around 5$ / 1 minute.
This short movie reflect exactly the situation in the romanian families at that time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HDM6ERbBKA
But since then, the phone calls got cheaper, the internet is always on and it's hard to find a place where you don't have broadband or mobile 4G internet. In Romania in 2021 there were around 800 verry small communities, smaller than villages, with population around 50 - 150 persons, that had no connection to broadband or mobile internet. The rest of the country has full coverage.
The smallest mobile plan with unlimited national calls and 50 Gb/ month is 2 euros, a gigabit broadband fiber optic plan is 6 euros in most cities. The internet is as common as electricity. We preffer to call each other on whatsapp or facetime, because the sound quality is better. The email has take it's place in our life: it took the role that Postal services had. Almost all official corespondence is made by email. Bills, contracts, notifications, bank statements, medical corespondence, all is made by email.
Email did not died, but it has it's place now, a very stable one. It's the replacement of the post box.
Gmail is the main email service now. You have to have a gmail account if you have an android phone or if you need to use google services. And the majority of people use their gmail account and are not so interested into getting another one.
For us, we saw the birth of the email services, the ups and downs, the way it developed. We lived the drama, the controversy, the first 50 Mb account (I think it was myrealbox.com) when every other email providers offered 1-2 Mb... that was an epic time and we had the chance to live those moments. That's why we care and that's why we are so interested about this subject.
The income from advertising is lower and lower, because the percent of users who have adblockers is rising day by day. That's why we see less and less websites offering free email accounts.
And there are some people who are still interested in their privacy, or who run a business and need personalized email addresses, and these people are still feeding the email services business. And this is the reason why gmail doesn't open new domains for free email accounts registration.
Also, it became very cheap to get a VPN and just run your own email service. People say that it's hard but it is not, iRedMail can be installed by anybody, it's very easy, and if you have a clean IP with rdns, spf and dkim and you don't send spam, you will have no problem sending to gmail or microsoft.
Email is not dead. In fact is still evolving. The next challenge seems to be email encryption. There are more and more services that try to develop this feature. Even Microsoft and Google, of course, for business plans.
Sorry for this long message and for my english, it's not my first language.