Yes, pretty much. I bought a domain to make sure I only have to do this once and parked it with Infomaniak.

Then I setup a new mail account (by now I abandoned Proton for Infomaniak there as well)

The next year I just kept responding with my new email address, asking people to update their contact data and each time I logged in somewhere I changed my email address. This went really well, just 1 or 2 services where I couldn't change it because they only accept the big providers, no custom domains.

In the end the first 3 weeks were really painful, afterwards it was smooth sailing.

Since then I've swiched provider quite a bit from Proton to Zoho and now to Infomaniak (where I will stay for a long time I think) and each of those changes took me about 2h each time.

So in sumnary, you will curse yourself for a few weeks and thank yourself later!

When first migrating away from Hotmail as a teenager, I just registered for new accounts/contracts on my own domain and migrated only the stuff I was still actively using

At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it

I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere

If you use their domain, its a paint and you need to do the steps you mention. If you have your own domain for emails, its basically a line in the dns settings and your emails go to the new provider. Everyone should own their E-Mail domain

I was on gmail since the invitation too. Using their domain.

I started to use my own domain within Gmail 2 years ago. Transitioned things I cared about to use that email at that time.

Then this years I moved to Proton using that domain. And I'm forwarding Gmail to proton indefinitely.

I told my family, friends to start using that address going forward.

Slowly but surely as I get email into my gmail folder on proton I take the time to go change the address.

The big change is using an address from you own domain.

I auto-forwarded to protonmail and replied from there. It took two years before I stopped receiving email that way.

This is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.