I’m in the process of getting rid of as much Google-related stuff as I can. Yesterday I already started with moving everything I had stored in Drive (backups and other stuff) to my Nextcloud and the like. Now I want to change my main email, the one I’m going to use for, my accounts here in the fediverse and so on. So I’m looking for alternatives.
At the moment, apart from Gmail, I also have an Outlook (from when it was hotmail), a Proton account (though in view of their CEO’s recent statements I may not keep it) and a new one on Disroot.
Which of the aforementioned services works best for a normie not well versed in cybersecurity like me?
Do you know of any alternatives I’m not aware of (I’ve heard of Tuta, but nothing else)?
I’ve thought about doing this myself but my GMail account is so ingrained in everything I don’t think I’d be able to untangle the mess.
Are there any big issues you see coming up with doing this, long standing accounts not letting you change email, etc?
Do you plan on keeping the old account around for a period to catch any services you might have forgotten about?
Be interesting to see a follow-up once you’re done to see what kind of pain it causes.
The process will not be abrupt but gradual. I will stay with an email service that seems to be the most functional for me and I will change one by one first the accounts and services I use the most and then the ones I use the least. When my old email is unlinked to most things in my life, I’ll leave it abandoned for about half a year or so, to adapt, and then I’ll delete it definitively (if it’s possible without anything exploding or Google sending a Drone to kill me lol).
When I switched away from gmail, I found it to overall be pretty straightforward. Whenever I would log into a service, I update the email. Any service I didn’t log into clearly doesn’t matter enough to me. My gmail is now a spam account for old shit I don’t care about.