I have completely stopped using google services and software on my personal devices (even have lineageos + microg on my phone. The problem is that I can’t just explain to the technically uneducated people that I changed mail providers. How should I go about doing this?
Thanks for elaborating! You raise a lot of good points.
I recently tried to consolidate all of my various email addresses into Thunderbird and oh boy is it fun trying to get a 20 year old Gmail account to cooperate. I often find myself having to open up Gmail in my browser just to get anything more complex than checking or writing new email accomplished. It doesn’t help that I have a quarter of a million messages organized between ~70 “folders”, I’m sure, but holy hell… it’s a nightmarescape. Thunderbird never stops querying the server. I’m about ready to backup all of the old messages and just burn the whole account down.
I could never get into Thunderbird. It would always crash out from the shear quanitity of old emails in each of my accounts.
It took me about a year to move my personal account away from Gmail and finally delete it.
Unfortunately Gmail is required for my work. I often direct people to another business email I set up but the boss doesn’t like that.