I haven’t used it much if at all in the past year, but I finally took the last step and deleted it! Sorry if this is low effort I just don’t have anyone I know to share it with.

  • 087008001234@lemmy.ml
    8·
    5 months ago

    Like others said, definitely a slow process. Sign up your new, necessary accounts to your new address and port your old existing accounts over a day at a time.

    Once you have ported an account over you can mass delete emails relevant to that service. You could also keep a log of everything you have ported. Or both.

    You can also straight up delete the accounts you don’t need anymore, if thats part of your goal, or something you would find satisfying. Same thing - deleting all of the emails relevant to it afterwards. Eventually you will be able to scroll through years of email without seeing anything you are worried about losing.

    Doing this passively, with little time investment over the course of a few years… one day you’re done and ready to cut the cord.

      • 087008001234@lemmy.ml
        1·
        5 months ago

        Regardless of whether you decide on self-hosting, or ProtonMail/Tutanota as has been suggested, make sure your choice gives you good freedom to roam. If you’re picking a webmail provider, consider prioritizing arbitrary email clients (Thunderbird, etc). Being able to click-drag your entire email backlog to a hard disk folder might be something you want down the road. Similarly - do some research about data portability options they may offer like XML backups. If we decide ProtonMail and Tutanota suck in ten years, you would probably feel pretty defeated – like you ended up with Gmail 2.0.

        I just keep telling people to basically “know their rights” and figure out what options they will have to the new service they are signing up to.

    • bob_lemon@feddit.de
      1·
      5 months ago

      I went through my stored logins to migrate the vast majority of my accounts one by one (and deleted quite a few old and forgotten ones in the process). Took a couple of hours, but went mostly well.

      For everything that I might have missed, I have gmail set up to forward everything to my new address. The new address (I went with posteo myself) has a filter that automatically moves stuff addressed to gmail to a separate folder. Whenever something ends up in there, I go and migrate or delete the account.