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Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

I still use it for all non-personal / unimportant email. It's good for that. They haven't required a mobile phone number and they won't get one: If it ever becomes a requirement I'll let the account die and go elsewhere. Google is 1,000x worse and I am very careful about what goes through ANY Google server (including / especially analytics on third party sites). Fortunately these are easy enough to block. That said, I still have a Google Voice account (great thing, that!) and a GMail account that's for slightly-more-important spam but still spam (a "gmail.com" email address isn't looked at with all that much disdain in the professional world when job-hunting, etc. whereas a "yahoo.com" might be and and "aol.com" certainly is).

It's impossible to completely prevent digital profiling and footprints but with a little effort you can make them very hard (and expensive) for scumbag marketers / big data types to bother with. Making it as hard and expensive as possible for them is something I get satisfaction from doing - almost as much as deliberately never buying from anyone who ever solicits me.

++What he said.