I recently tackled a full degoogle. I still have my email running, I really wouldn’t recommend deleting it for legacy purposes. But the tens of thousands of emails I had are fully deleted from gmail. I unsubscribed from basically everything, and hardly get emails there anymore.
I used Google takeout to get the emails exported. I had to do this per gmail account. They give you something called a .mbox file. I now use proton mail and pay for their service (I think paying makes sense for the service given the alternative is getting your data scraped for advertising revenue). I stored a backup of the .mbox file in my proton drive, and loaded the file in thunderbird (on linux with an encrypted drive) for whenever I need to search those old emails.
Overall it’s pretty easy. The hardest part was a bit of Thunderbird jank for first time setup. This guide was helpful: https://www.howtogeek.com/709718/how-to-open-an-mbox-file-in-mozilla-thunderbird/
Good luck :)
Tech workers needed to unionize yesterday. The trillion dollar investment to automate away white collar work should have us all organizing. Unfortunately, software engineers tend to be very tepid and don’t want to rock the boat. I’ve also found myself contracting a lot lately which gives me substantially less power to organize. But even the tendency towards contracting is one that disempowers workers and makes them feel disposable.
Unionization desperately needs to happen.