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
When they combined all google services to one drive, including Photos and mail sharing the same 15gb, I decided to drop all google services
Never looked back.
Google feels like a service you can’t live without but honestly moving away from it works great for me
The only service that I still keep is Calendar as I need it to sync with my partners google calendar
I haven’t really tried to see if things work with an other service