This has been an issue for years. (I've worked in libraries, including public ones, on and off since 2004).
It's not just a GOOG problem. In fact, Yahoo makes me want to show up and yell at some business people: They lock people out of their accounts and then CHARGE THEM TO CALL IN and fix it. Another general issue is how much of this population uses/sticks with old products: There is a large number of Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail addresses still being used, as well as old ISP mailboxes.
Agreed on Yahoo and ISP emails being awful, but Microsoft migrated all the hotmail users over to Outlook years ago. At this point, there is only a cosmetic difference between a hotmail.com email and a outlook.com email. I'm normally not a big Microsoft fan, but that was one change they handled reasonably well.
Oh yeah, it was just an example of how this population stays with familiar products far beyond their usual lifespan. So they often want support for products and services that are old or unsupported. And why changes really screw them over: A lot of these people just have GMail accounts from when they were easier to use.
MS did well on this one, I agree. (And I also hate MS but credit where credit is due.)
Has GOOG done anything about it in the past year?
There needs to be a better way.