I don't know about the forwarding thing but gmail stopped letting me login a about a year ago so I opened an acct with protonmail.com. You get a small amount of "space" for free with pay options for more. I understand them to be rather secure, based in Sweden(?).

might look into that.

Protonmail.com

There is a way to stop the AI, but I can't remember how. Other than that, I have had no problems for over 20 Years. Ghosterly will stop most of your ads on all sites.

Ghostery, have for years and wouldn't go without.

Yes, forwarding mail is probably that easy. There is no way however to move yahoo mail archives to gmail which was a popular rumor about 12 years ago.

I dislike gmail but it does allow easy sorting. It's responsiveness can be slow. And google follows you everywhere. The only thing worse for responsiveness is Linked-In.

Yahoo has switched back to struggling with spam filters. I think they are paid to let some spam in. I've had yahoo for more than 25 years, and tire of the conversions to different levels and rules. It's a nightmare for me to extract what I've archived in that account, but I started on the project. I have to download each email individually.

I surely prefer mail.com. I've had that for 20+ years. Easy sorting, quick responsiveness. THey went through a glitchy few days about 2008 when they changed platforms or something, but they've been good otherwise. If my mailbox storage ever fills up there is always their connection to the cloud, or paying a yearly fee which I would do b/c I can't lose this account.

your permission. I don't need a summary of what is in every mail. and the spam is out of control lately

I use comcast and Apple mail. (icloud.com)
They both use IMAP protocols. Easy setup on your end.

I don't think you have to be an Apple customer to get an account. "It works", and
Every comcast/xfinity customer gets 6 accounts last time I checked. You must have a relative or friend. Just have them go into the admin panel on the web and create an account.

I guess that "they spy less" than others, being "sorta free" in that most of their users actually bought equipment and/or services.

That said, you might prefer one of the privacy-focused alternatives. I can't recommend one.

I am thumbs down on Yahoo (and LinkedIn, Docusign, Experian? and others) since they were hacked long ago, and stored passwords in plain text.

Google is a spy operation from alpha to omega.

I also have gmail which I like much better, but I've had this AOL address for 25 years. I used to be able to filter to "allow people on my list" and it was great! I would check my spam once a day and if it was someone I knew or wanted to receive email from, I would add them to my address book. Now, AOL says that my gmail is spam. Yet, I also get tons and tons of span.

It's really bad.

I would not not go there!