I would rather invest 10 x 60 Eur = 600 Eur every 10 years into new laptop or bigger RAM rather then trying to switch to non-free email and lose whole Google ecosystem.
Not having much spam is number one priority for me. 50ms delay in refresh rate is OK. In fact I have never noticed and it have never came to my mind that Gmail is slow. Yes, it needs RAM but I was never annoyed by any "slowness".
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014).
I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
The signal is never 100% clear in any real world scenario... Noise is everywhere. But when there is some (even very little) signal in the noise, it is not the noise any more and the signal can be retrieved assuming enough data.
AI can be trained on some special knowledge of person A and another special knowledge of person B. These two persons may never met before and therefore they can not combine their knowledge to get some new knowledge or insight.
AI can do it fine as it knows A and B. And that is knowledge creation.
Not having much spam is number one priority for me. 50ms delay in refresh rate is OK. In fact I have never noticed and it have never came to my mind that Gmail is slow. Yes, it needs RAM but I was never annoyed by any "slowness".