The one gap here, is that if Google closes down your email account you can still be dead in the water if you have any services that rely on that email. Such as email based 2-factor authentication, or any websites that you forgot your credentials for an need to rely on an emailed password reset.

You can mitigate this by having your own domain and host the email on Google Apps -- that way if they take away your access you just update your mx record to point to somewhere else. But you can also easily lose your domain name (due to malice or accident).

BTW, if an emergency does happen, anyone have a recommendation for a decent web email client that I can point my MX record to? Preferably one that has both hosted and self-hosted options. Or something that I can spin up easily on a cloud service such as AWS.

A couple of open source clients [1] and [2]- both self-hosted and deployable on AWS or any other cloud service, or any other hosting service with ssh root access:

[1] https://squirrelmail.org/about/ [2] https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail

As an aside, VestaCP [3] - an open source hosting admin panel that you can install within a few minutes via ssh - will install squirrelmail automatically:

[3] http://vestacp.com/

I started deleting my emails and I feel really better that this big stack of crap is erased forever. The whole concept of archiving mail is disgusting. Everybody is concerned by climate change, but seriously, storing all these data is crazy and dirty, a datacenter is everything but clean.

No backups to deal with and no procrastination-until-the-end-of-your-life. Save the planet and get away from your past.

I have two decades of email saved; it's a few gigabytes and could fit on a single USB stick or DVDW.

I happen to like my past and want to keep it, even if I don't habitually refer to it.

this looks interesting. Does it also restore to another IMAP provider?

mbsync [1] is worth looking into. I found it to perform better than Offline IMHO and complained less. It will store downloaded emails in maildir format.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync