Not an "easy" way, but what I've been doing is simply whenever I handle an email in the account I want to switch from, I use that particular situation to change the email in the settings of the account of whatever I'm handling in that moment.
That way it doesn't become an overwhelming task, and if you are consistent with it and do it each time you handle an email, slowly but surely you will have switched completely.
Proton is probably the slickest, most feature-rich and solid email service. They have a suite... Mail, VPN, Calendar, etc. I pay like $50 yearly for it, which gives a lot of extra settings. But even in the free account there is a "convert from Gmail" option that downloads all of your Gmail emails into your proton account. It's the easiest way to degoogle. Plus, all proton-to-proton email is automatically PGP encrypted, even if you use custom domains. You can easily setup auto PGP for other external services that offer it too, so emails are seamlessly encrypted between them.
This short guide gets you up and running with Proton Mail if you are transferring your files from Gmail. You can seamlessly move the emails, attachments, calendars, and contacts you have stored in your Gmail account to Proton Mail and Proton Calendar
Yeah generally subscriptions extend automatically unless you cancel. They're subscriptions. I don't know about the first part, it sounds like a bug. They may be shady on the business end in certain circumstance (not sure why they would be, they're a successful company with a lot to lose), but I've set 6 clients up with them over 2 years and haven't had any issues with billing or cancellation. The person also did a chargeback after not contacting support and waiting, which if you're on the business end of things you know is a big fucking no-no. You get enough charge backs in a period and your bank will shut your account down. PayPal is even worse, they'll hold ALL your money ransom and many times not give it back and there's no recourse. Many customers don't realize this as they've never had to deal with anything business related. I can tell you that's why Proton was so adamant about them undoing the chargeback before any refund. I don't know about them not refunding the entire amount although I wonder if that's related to the first issue where it wasn't showing it as paid, so in their system it showed the full amount not-owed as being refunded.
I've been worried about the same. I'm slowly moving my email and all accounts over my own domain name which for now is forwarded onto the same Gmail. Seems like an extra hop but if they block me then all I have to do is point my email somewhere else
I'm trying out Purely Mail. Unlimited email addresses across unlimited custom domains.
I have a cool setup where I have setup an email account at [email protected], but it's setup as a catchall for *@service.mydomain.tld (and allows gmail-style tagging). This means I can fill out service forms by inventing addresses on the fly like [email protected] and the email shows up in one unified inbox, the subject line will include [LemonadeStand], and the message will have the flag 'Signup'.
Use a dedicated account for YouTube. How will they remove your emails if they're on a separate account?
I use a YouTube channel account, which might be good enough. I've had one in the past banned and the rest of my Google account was left alone.
(I was only just getting into creating programs that communicate with online services and I hammered their API. My program didn't have any checks and balances to ensure it wouldn't go over it or to throttle back when the API endpoint attempts tell it to calm down. It only happened once but that was good enough to get it banned)