Just a little at a time. Most sites let you change your email. As you get a message from a site move it to your other email.

You’re using a password manager right? Just iterate through the entries in your password manager updating.

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.

I transitioned e-mail address twice. What has worked for me is doing it slowly. Keep the old address around: from time to time you’ll get emails from services you did not even remember being subscribed to. Also, if you don’t use a password manager, now it’s the perfect time to start. I suggest Bitwaden

Less of a leap and more of a careful crawl. Use nee email for new services, and deactivate old accounts if possible. I have yet to selfhost email, but for hosted options proton and tutanota are better than gmail for easily. The issue with selfhosting email is that it is easy to get blacklisted iirc.

I’m thinking about this every once in a while. What about using a custom domain and a relay service like FireFox Relay or Addy.io? That would give you the option to move your actual email around easily, even after you lose access to it.

Doesn’t take nearly as long as you’d think if you start to slowly transition stuff to the new address.

I switched to Fastmail a few months ago and love it.

My tip is: Start simple.

1. If you have any other Domains forwarded to Gmail forward them to Fastmail instead.
2. Forward Gmail to Fastmail (i.e. add as an account including importing old mails). This won’t get you off Google yet, but at least a backup and you can practically stop using Gmail.
3. For any new registration, use Fastmail (or any of its random emails etc.)
4. Slowly transition your old accounts.

I’m still transitioning to gmail from my hotmail accounts…

So first off, not sure if you’re in a different country or something, but I live in the US, and basically every website, Government or not, has a way to easily change your email address.

I’ve run into one or two that I had to call to confirm, but still, it was pretty painless.

Second, gmail allows you to automatically forward your emails to a different email address. While you’re going through the process of changing your primary email on different websites, set up a universal forwarding rule on gmail to send all emails to your new address.

Third, for actually transitioning your emails, sit down and write a list out of all your services that are tied to your email starting with most critical first. This would be banking, auto bill payments for utilities, car payments, credit cards, phone/internet payments, investment logins, etc.

Basically, the sites that if you lost access to or couldn’t auto pay with, you would be screwed or at risk of late payments.

Getting all of those down should be pretty quick because there shouldn’t be that many unless you have a ton of different loans, banks, and investment portfollios.

Getting those taken care of will take your stress down significantly. Then move on to important, but not critical, this could be your streaming services, other subscriptions like news sites or newsletters, important apps or services you pay for.

Then tier three is everything else. Stuff that doesn’t really matter that much.

This is what I did and now I’m completely off Gmail/Outlook and onto Protonmail and love it.

Last thing to remember is to download anything in your email that might be important. Just force the rule to run through your whole inbox and it will forward all your old emails to your new address. This will likely take many hours to fully sync, but eventually all email records will be moved over to your new email address.

I’m been in this process for the last two months (because there are so many sites to change my e-mail address). I went with Gmail originally so I did not have to change my address everytime I changed ISPs.

So my first step was to use my own domain name so that as long as i keep renewing that annually (it’s a small cost) then I keep my e-mail address (even if I change actual e-mail providers).

Next was to find an e-mail service I could point my domain to. I also needed one where I could download my e-mail to my desktop computer for archiving and reference, eg. I’m using BetterBird, but ThunderBird is another option.

So finding a mail provider is interesting as most that let you use your own domain name (custom domain name) are not free. One option was paying a small fee to by actual domain provider and use their service. I went though for ProtonMail in the end as I was already paying for their VPN service, so the difference to upgrade to the “everything” account was not that much more and scored me 500GB of online storage too (I pay separately for Bitwarden password management, otherwise that would be another plus). This allowed me to use my custom domain name (unlimited addresses), download mail through their bridge, etc.

So the real challenge really was finding a suitable mail service. I can switch easily in the future as I just point my domain name to the new mail provider, and never have to update my mail address at any sites again, and all mail is always available on my desktop computer.

Some e-mail providers (like Proton for example) allow you to import your e-mails and contacts from gmail - that’s a start. You probably have all your passwords saved in browser/manager so you will know where to go to update them - unfortunately I don’t think there’s an automated way to do it, but it probably seems like more hassle than it actually is. I’d also search your mailbox for keywords like “welcome” or “account” to see if there are any other services you forgot you signed up for and haven’t saved the password in browser/manager.

After all is migrated and updated, you would probably want to delete your google account but I wouldn’t do that right away, just to give yourself some extra time in case you forgot about something. Log out of all google services and stop using them. Set a reminder for 1 year from now to delete the account.

Most websites don’t let you change the email? Just create a new account then.

You have to make some sacrifices to get away from having your entire identity online tied to Google. Be willing to have some downsides to get upsides.

Use your own domain for the migration. That means if you ever move again you won’t have to do this again. You can just point the domain at a new email service.

Just change the email address for all your accounts where it’s possible to change it. In your GMail settings forward all incoming emails to your new email adress.