@cliffwade I'd like to read this post but connection to the site is timing out. Is something wrong on your end
The site was down for a bit but should be back up and running without issues.
@cliffwade thanks! Helpful piece. That's why I've been planning to switch... Want to take my privacy more seriously... But the effort of switching email addresses seems like a big lift. And paying for email is psychologically hard tho the other services help.
One solution I don't have yet is document editing. I've been on Gmail since 07 or 08 and docs/drive since it started. With a chromebook currently, I have no local editor. Any suggestions for that?

@cmonster @cliffwade

One question that I had is by reading your post, it is likely that you wanted to get rid of the ads.
But since day one, I have a paid subscription for Gmail and Drive and I have never seen an ad.
So why not switch to a paid Gmail subscription ?

I wanted to have something more secure, to get rid of the ads(though I rarely saw them), and to move away from something that got tons of spam.
@cliffwade
I plan to switch not for the ads or something but for the fact I do not know what they might do in the future with my data. For the moment, until I pay, it looks "safe". But who knows?
Also Google has increased the price of 40% which in fact is aligned with Proton.
I have installed proton and Mail, Contact, Calendar and Drive are really equals.
Just the photo app which is way less user friendly I find.
Privacy is becoming a much bigger thing for me personally, so that’s the big reason why I made the switch. Also, if you are interested in signing up, let me know as I can give you a referral code that you can use and you’ll get one month of Mail Plus for free to test it all out.
@cliffwade thanks for the offer !
I am evaluating the application right now but the free account is big enough to have a good idea on how to use it and what it is capable.
No problem. I did find out today, that the referral code only works on brand new accounts. So if you have an account already, you can’t use the referral link to get the Mail Plus month for free on that already created account. 🙁
@cliffwade no problem.
I am more or less in the same situation as you.
I checked this weekend and my first mail in Gmail is from 2003.
Which means I have exceeded the free tier that you have in Gmail and as I have a custom domain, I use Google workspace.
I am listing all the dependencies I have on my Google account to see if I will have a big impact to change.
Due to the volume of data I have, I can not keep gmail dormant for archive. Otherwise I have to pay twice.