I think the point is that you don't abandon gmail right now, you give yourself an alternative, and when you access a service or decide to change something about it or need to recover an email, you change it then (and store the new info in your password manager, maybe mark/rename the old info as OBSOLETE if you have that sort of control), and eventually you've decoupled yourself mostly.

Truly decoupling yourself is hard, and you'll probably be finding old accounts and dealing with them for years, but getting 95% of the stuff moved over the next year or so will likely give you a lot of peace of mind if you're actaully worried about it.

FWIW if you're actually worried about it, you should also make sure your email is through a domain you control (even if just pointed towards a service, or even gmail) and that domain service is not linked administratively to the same account that you use for email (e.g. don't register domain through google and then point at gmail), so worst case you can change the destination service by changing MX records and just swap all your email at once to a new handler (or if you're a masochist or as a last resort point towards your own mail server you admin). Just make sure it never expires (in the end, there's always something to worry about, you need to find the risk you're most comfortable with).

1) Buy domain

2) Buy mail services from fastmail

3) Set up forwarding in Gmail

4) Every Saturday you go through your inbox and change the email address on accounts important to you, and unsubscribe from the rest.

And you should still log in to Gmail of course, to avoid account shutdown. Also, Gmail doesn't forward what it considers spam.

Ideally, you get your own domain and point that at whatever provider you feel like. Should you ever be locked out by a provider you point the domain to another one. If you follow a semi regular back up schedule for email you could even import your existing emails to some providers.

It’s much, much easier to change account details when you can still access the old email. Get your own domain for $20/year and you never have to worry about losing access again. You can always redirect your domain to a new email provider if something happens

It's not as bad as you think. Fastmail has a great import process.

Transitioning to a new email address isn't really that bad. I did it about 15 years ago. Whenever you log in to a site and you notice that it's using your old email address, you go into your profile settings and update it. After about a year you'll probably have hit 90% of your meaningful accounts.

You set up mail forwarding today and eventually, in the span of just a few years you'll be free of Google.

I started my move in November of 2018 according to my Fastmail billing history.

I've _still_ got a few places that insist sending mail to Gmail (mostly sites that don't let me switch email for some weird reason).

I got my own domain, set it up on Fastmail, imported all my old mails from Gmail and set up a permanent forward from Gmail to Fastmail.

Then I set up a filter on Fastmail that shows all mails that were sent to my Gmail address and slowly went through that list and switched from @gmail.com to my own domain.

Now I'm the customer for my email instead of the product and I 100% own my own domain so no single company can take it away.

> Abandoning Gmail right now would be the same as Gmail disabling my account

There's your problem fishbulb.