> I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.

Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.

I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?