I'm slowly continuing my de-googling quest. Next up is a doozy: leaving GMail. Like many people, I've used just one GMail account for almost everything for many years, and the idea of updating all my contacts and services and migrating all those messages is daunting.
Still, those messages paint a very complete picture of my personality, activities, shopping habits, life story, political views, and social network. I no longer trust Google to respect that data and keep it private. I also don't like having it all behind one account I could get locked out of.
Thankfully, some people have already written thoughtful guides about how to make this transition. It's a lot of work, but it helps tremendously to have someone walk me through the thought process and what steps to take. It reduces the cognitive burden, and makes the task accessible.
These guides look very good to me:
1) https://www.optoutproject.net/secure-email/
2) https://www.optoutproject.net/mask-email/
3) https://www.optoutproject.net/leave-gmail/