> exactly what was advertised, a working email service
Claiming Gmail (even the free one) doesn't work when, in fact, it experiences seemingly random and very infrequent outages, is disingenuous. It's incredibly hard to make a complex application like Gmail work perfectly all the time for all its users and I'm completely sure they are well within their ToS. Much like we are willing to live with software that has some bugs, we must be willing to live with services that aren't always there.
Buses stop, rails need maintenance and your plumbing sometimes fails. Life continues.
To be fair, the OP shouldn't be able to expect a 100% working email service. But to expect that the provider not be actively causing it to fail seems reasonable.
Claiming Gmail (even the free one) doesn't work when, in fact, it experiences seemingly random and very infrequent outages, is disingenuous. It's incredibly hard to make a complex application like Gmail work perfectly all the time for all its users and I'm completely sure they are well within their ToS. Much like we are willing to live with software that has some bugs, we must be willing to live with services that aren't always there.
Buses stop, rails need maintenance and your plumbing sometimes fails. Life continues.