This is a great thing for startups to exploit who really care deeply about all of their customers. They can easily take business away from large, monolithic companies that don't really care about losing one measly person.
Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.
I'm still looking for a great alternative to Gmail/Google apps for my business email. Something that supports IMAP and has a reasonable webmail front end. Fastmail is the closest thing i've found but this could be a perfectly fine startup which probably simply isn't sexy enough for anything to actually go and do.
Gmail's IMAP implementation is really buggy. No distinction between tags and folders, non sorting done at the server level, etc. Frustrated, I also moved to fastmail two years ago; it is slightly expensive, but is standard's compliant and works flawlessly.
I should have maybe clarified that i too have moved to Fastmail (about a year ago) and am a happy customer. But both the price and the UI leave a lot of room for improvement, i.e. competitors.
And yes moving mail out of Gmail was a pain because of the weird IMAP structure they use.
IMAP has tags (rather keywords), that you can assign to multiple posts. Just because you assign a keyword to an email, doesn't mean that it should be moved to a new folder. Gmail does that, and therefore breaks IMAP.
Many of our big wins come from doing something better that Microsoft or Google already might do, but doing it 10x better AND offering great customer support.