I got my Gmail account back when it was in invite-only beta. I tried moving to iCloud, and ProtonMail… it never happened. I have too much history, too many places have that Gmail account and I don’t even know who. Even if I had an exhaustive list, changing it everywhere would likely be impossible.

I recently decided to give up and start divesting from the other accounts.

I will likely keep the iCloud Mail account, since I use iCloud for contacts, calendar, etc.. but it’s only my dad and a few accounts that it’s used for these days.

When I went to ProtonMail, I religiously tracked every time I used it anywhere so I should be able to unwind it.

I want to divest from Google as a whole, I even pay for Kagi. However, at this point it would be impossible to actually delete my account. All I did by trying was complicate my life and confuse everyone. I told my family to use iCloud to email me and my dad was the only person who actually switched. I suffered in this purgatory of email providers for probably the last 10+ years before recently coming to my senses.

I do just use the email though. I don’t use Gmail as the reason to use all of Google’s information management stuff. I don’t use Drive, Docs, Keep, Tasks, Contacts, Calendar, or any of that other stuff. Gmail, YouTube, and Maps (for points of interest and business information… not navigation). Early on with the iPhone where were weird sync issues when trying to use Google Contacts with the Apple apps, due to some different fields in play, so I moved away from all of that and never looked back. In my personal life, the crossover between mail and calendar is pretty light, and I only send email to a few people where contacts integration also isn’t a big deal.

I did have about 5 alt gmail accounts. I did recently go through those, migrate some accounts, and delete those in full, so that was nice. But most of them had been sitting largely unused for 10 years, which made it easier. I’ve also been using the same password manager for nearly 20 years, so that was also a huge help.

in my country we don't use text messages or emails to contact but whatsapp (so no emails) I have 7 gmail accounts, 1 main one, a secondary one that I manage for a family member and another older one that I have just for nostalgia, I use the others for spam. I only use Apple apps and they work great for me.I could never use proton mail as the main one, the apple services I use are: reminders, apple maps, imessage, drive, and other apple apps, they work. owned by google I only use youtube and gmail

You can keep your gmail forever and have it forward to anywhere you want, so you don't have to hunt and change your preferences for every account you ever made. What are you agonizing over? It's easy to switch e-mail providers and very little hassle.