How do you even start with breaking up with your gmail?
I have this bad feeling daily that for whatever reason I loose access to my gmail. Don't think of anything shady but simply I just loose it. There is a very small chance to it but still. You can read the stories that people uploaded their family photos to google drive and the algorithm marks their kids photos CP and they loose their account. Or maybe your email is used to spam or anything similar. There is no way to talk to google support, it is an endless loop of help pages.
I just can't live with this. I know billions of people do, but I cannot. My email address is registered to hundreds of websites including government and banking sites.
You could literally destroy me financially or other ways by just gaining login to my gmail. Google could cause me HUGE problems by locking me out.
I decided to start transitioning to an email with my own domain. I have the doimain, I have the email client setup. So what do you do with your existing stuff? Most websites dont even let you change the email. I have to take appointment in government offices to change my email. It seems like a giant task.
Start by changing your most important services to your new email, and set your gmail to forward everything to your new email. From then, sign up to new sites with your new email and change emails of old accounts if you have time, it's not a huge rush.
As long as you set up the email forwarding, you've done most of the important work right there.
You can also auto-label anything in your new account based on From: in the header to indicate that it got forwarded from the old account. This way you will know what you still need to switch over.
Yeah I have them auto go into an "old email" folder rather than clutter my inbox especially if it's forwarding crap newsletters/spam etc. I was very liberal with my old email...
But it's step 1 to moving off. Often just having the one place is what holds people back. I've migrated several people from Gmail by just starting with that as an easy transition... just giving out a different email with everything else staying the same.