&gt; Which is different from any other email provider in any substantial way (including your local ISP or personal server) because...<p>Single point of failure.<p>Government entities have to go through physical work to seize multiple mail servers distributed geographically.  This keeps the cost of fishing expeditions high enough that they won&#x27;t just do it by default.<p>With everything at Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft, you only need to serve 3 entities, who already are known to roll over.<p>However, far more concerning to the HN crowd should be this fact: Do you want the companies most likely to buy you out for a large value to be the ones holding all of your internal emails?<p>At this point, Google probably knows more about the quality of business than the businesses do.  It would be an interesting question as to whether Google could be considered a corporate insider for a vast number of companies.