I received the announcement email today. I understand and appreciate them offering the email service for free for many years. It's a lot of work and I was always wondering how they manage to offer email hosting for free.
Free is a marketing gimmick. It was never free but included in the domain package = domain registration + dns hosting + email boxes. The domain prices were generally higher than some concurrents. Now all of a sudden the domains see a price hike of 20-40% and each basic mail box that was included costs 57€ VAT included. So if you use the mail box this is essentially x3 or worse on the price. God forbid you used two mailboxes.
