Google will soon require you to provide your phone number first, before giving you 15GB.
But they will still bombard you with sponsored emails.
We need to move away from thinking that services that harvest your data and worsen the experience with injected adverts are “free”.
That said, many alternatives do have truly free plans. Check out Proton, IKMail or Atomic Mail, to name a few.
For more: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/category/music-streaming
Gmail is only useful for junk mail anyways… nothing gets read in my google email.
I’ve been burned by spam on my duck.com privacy email that forwards to my personal, after switching its forward address to a bin account (it literally starts with ddgtrashheap) I fully recommend using a duck alias so as to protect your personal address, and have an out if it gets compromised. Now the only emails in my gmail account are from companies I don’t trust, like when a retailer uses shopify.