[taneq]

And now think what would happen to you if your Gmail account was locked. No recourse, no response except form mails saying "your account is banned because it's banned." No way to recover any other account using it as recovery mail. No way to access your records or email history. Maybe locked out of your phone too. You're boned.

That's what made me extract myself from Gmail. I created my new email address and forwarded my Gmail account to it, and then for every email coming to the Gmail address I updated the sender with my new address. It took me about six months before all my important mail was using my new address, but it actually wasn't that hard and I feel hugely less vulnerable to Google's whims.

Edit: At the same time I also started using a proper password manager, making me again much less vulnerable to losing an email account because I no longer rely on resetting passwords to get into my multifarious online accounts.

[kkarakk]

If your account is banned do your auto reply(canned responses) stop working? Coz that would be a proper stop gap to tell important people(job offers/contact requests for eg) to your website/email you actually use etc.

[eridius]

If your account is banned how would you even set up an auto-reply to tell people about your new email?

[creatornator]

Presumably it would be set up before-hand? If you preferred the other email, you might deprecate the gmail account and set up an auto-reply for all traffic to update contact information. It would require giving up gmail early. The question would be if auto-reply keeps working after being banned