India will reportedly ban use of US e-mail services (opens in new tab)

I noticed this trend around colleges, but also in some small businesses, of people being given official email addresses but preferring to use their own. Reading the article, that sounds like the case here. The government employees are preferring to conduct business with email addresses they've had for years rather than their official address, perhaps even forwarding their official address email to their personal email address.

On the other hand, at least here in GA I've noticed that many small businesses have stopped self-hosting email, if they ever did to begin with, because it was cheaper to contract it out. They could get greater reliability for a reduced cost compared to having (potentially) additional IT staff to handle the workload associated with it (same with other hosting services). Or if they were too cheap to hire the additional staff, as one company I saw was, the IT staff convinced them to outsource it so they could free up their time to work on things the company actually needed them to focus on.

200 person company here. No Exchange, but everyone uses Outlook. You want email on your phone? IT gives you a yourname.ourcompany@gmail.com (with the default password of something like ourcompany1234) and you can get emails forwarded to your phone, and then it looks unprofessional as all hell when you email bobsmith@company.com and bobsmith.company@gmail.com emails you back.

Why? Because our incompetent IT director won't allow access to the email server if it's not through a VPN. What is this, 2001?

In India most Government departments, even the intelligence agencies use Yahoo or Gmail. Its terrible.