Step Two: Set up gmail to forward all emails to the new email account.
Step Three: Stop giving out your gmail address.
Step Four: Start marking all emails that get forwarded to you through gmail that you don't want to see as spam in gmail.
Step Five: Start migrating all real-life contacts and online accounts to use your tutanota email account.
-----------------------
SERIOUSLY, start paying for email from an email-specialized company in some European country with extremely strict privacy (such as Germany). GET OUT OF GMAIL and OUT OF U.S.A. EMAIL-BASED PROVIDRES A.S.A.P.
A dollar a day is quite expensive, you can get a domain and a email prodiver for like 5€ per month.
See for example this [Dutch provider](https://www.transip.nl/webhosting/) that I myself use, but it includes webhosting. So you can probably find email providers for less.
The problem is how effective they are at killing spam. I'm sure most of us (I still use Gmail) would jump ship in a second if there was a decent alternative that doesn't force the user to spend time training a local antispam system. Admittedly, Google is really good at that.
I support this idea, but I wouldn't touch something like Tutanota or ProtonMail that doesn't support an open standard like IMAP (or doesn't provide it for the free tier or has "bridge" applications to install) for saving and archiving mails offline on a computer. Tutanota and ProtonMail are both walled gardens of their own making. I can't easily migrate out of Tutanota (or ProtonMail if I'm a free tier user) and take my emails elsewhere. I appreciate that they provide (or claim to provide) better encryption, but I like to have control over my data and where I have copies of in an easily accessible manner.
I'd suggest instead, for much cheaper, Posteo.de, Runbox.com, Mailbox.org, Mailfence.com or Migadu.
$1 a day for an email account? That's ridiculously expensive not just from an ad-paid perspective (gmail etc) but also compared to the market rate for reliable, feature rich fully paid by user services. Pay a tenth of that and you are already far away from the cheap end of that market.
I've used a similar process; my gmail has a vacation auto-responder that informs those contacting it that the address is not used for email. The auto-response does not include my actual email address.
Even still, I find that other people's address books are remarkably immutable and despite this auto-response having been employed for around five years I still have important emails directed at the dead address.
Step Two: Set up gmail to forward all emails to the new email account.
Step Three: Stop giving out your gmail address.
Step Four: Start marking all emails that get forwarded to you through gmail that you don't want to see as spam in gmail.
Step Five: Start migrating all real-life contacts and online accounts to use your tutanota email account.
-----------------------
SERIOUSLY, start paying for email from an email-specialized company in some European country with extremely strict privacy (such as Germany). GET OUT OF GMAIL and OUT OF U.S.A. EMAIL-BASED PROVIDRES A.S.A.P.