Buy [yourname].com on Gandi. Comes with two 2GB mailboxes or 50GB for something like $1/mo. Forward your GMail to your new address.
Then stop entering your old email address anywhere. If you notice yourself typing your old address, migrate the account to the new one. Eventually all the accounts that you care about will be moved over.
I agree with that strategy. I was using @gmail.com since 2007 and just setting up new e-mail on new domain and using it was enough to reduce old @gmail.com traffic to max 1 new e-mail per week.
Second the choice to use Gandi.net. 3Gb included with your domain. Their spam filter isn't as good as Fastmail's, which isn't as good as Gmail's. I'm back to training my mail clients' Bayesian spam filters like it's 2006.
I also set up an autoresponder on Gmail with the following message:
Hi -
I'm moving off Google Mail to a privacy-respecting provider.
Please update your address book to change my address to <me@mydomain>.
Thank you!
regards
Ben
Mailing lists dump that response into /dev/null and my human correspondents quickly and quietly complied.
The suggestion in the article is pretty straightforward. Forward Gmail to FastMail, and migrate your accounts and personal communications to the new address.
I did roughly the same years ago and it’s not difficult. Every once in a while I get a email forwarded from my old gmail but it’s effectively a complete migration.
Get yourself a domain with some webhosting attached and start switching mail-by-mail. Everytime you receive something "important", log in to that service and change the mail address.
Thunderbird with filters does a pretty good job with keeping my inbox clean, although I'm aiming for much less mails anyway.
Emails are like postcards, easily read by anyone who handles them. Just because your mailbox provider isn't google, doesn't mean it doesn't come in contact with google somewhere else.
If you really don't want them to be able to collect the content of your mails then you and all who write to you have to encrypt them. And then you would still have the problem of the metadata to be accessible.
