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".
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.