Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.

Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.

One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).

If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.

Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.

It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.

Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.

Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.

Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.

It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync

Set up the redirect and change the emails of your services one by one whenever you have a minute of time. It took a year for me, and I am free now.

I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while

In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing

I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.