[kup0]

It's easy to say the smart choice was to avoid it, but I think that's quite a naive comment.

Hindsight is 20/20 and the email landscape is different now than it was then. At the time I got my gmail (back when invites were still a thing) most options available to me were either ISP email or free web email, and gmail was one of the best. Not to mention, I was a lot younger and probably not in a position where paying for email made sense, and certainly not running my own.

For those of us that started many many years ago with gmail and kept it out of an inertia of convenience, now it is difficult to get everything switched off of it.

The difficult part isn't moving emails over. The difficult part is all the accounts and websites online I've signed up on with gmail that I need to switch the email address on. That's going to be a nightmare.

[danillonunes]

You can keep your Gmail account forever and transition to a new email in a slow pace. By auto forwarding your Gmail to your new account, or if your new email can act like POP or IMAP client to access your old Gmail, this process is painless.

I had a Gmail in the month it was launched and I switched to my own domain (ironically, still in GSuite) in a process that took a few years. Whenever I login into a site with my old email, I would update it to the new one. My current email still connect to my old Gmail over POP3, but it’s mostly empty.