This is also a question for how people organize and find emails who aren’t using a capable email search feature.
The biggest hinderance to leaving Gmail for me is losing Gmail’s search capabilities. This isn’t just a convenience feature, it’s dictated how I use email since 2007. I didn’t really use personal email much before then.
Even though I make an effort to delete useless junk, I still have over 50,000 emails. My other family members don’t bother deleting anything and they have hundreds of thousands of emails. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Gmail users have over a million stored emails.
Storage was never an issue since even the free 15 GB has been more than enough. For me, even after 18 years, I’m only using less than 1.5 GB. The search functionality makes it so I can always find things in seconds including long forgotten emails.
Proton only searches through senders/recipients and subject lines. Tuta doesn’t even work with emails older than a month.
I do have a free Proton account and some secondary Gmail accounts, but they’re used sparingly for compartmentalized purposes so their inboxes are empty most of the time - so search was never a big issue.
Moving my actual personal Gmail elsewhere is another story altogether.
My first baby step was to remove the Gmail app from my GrapheneOS phone and use the mobile Thunderbird app to access Gmail instead, which I think would be a similar experience to using other IMAP email providers like fastmail. But, the search functionality in Thunderbird is still nowhere close to as good as the native Gmail app, even when I set Thunderbird to keep a copy of all my emails stored locally. Even just a few hours later, I was on the phone with someone and had to quickly pull up emails and attachments I received 13 years ago mid-conversation. Thunderbird found nothing. I ended up reinstalling Gmail during the conversation and it found the emails in a second.
What are your suggestions and tips?