@roamer_1 was very helpful in that regard. I switched over to Thunderbird, and run all my gmail through that. I have been very happy with this. No cloud. No monthly charge. And no initial cost. And it does what I want, not what corporate America wants me to want.
You know what's dumb? I have gone, more and more, over to the cloud. Now, understand me in that, because my family has private cloudspace running our own servers, but even so, my volatile current storage goes right up on OneDrive, and I have done all I can to choose Samsung and Microsoft (better the devils I know)and remove Google.
I am doing all I can to get my phones to ONLY talk to my private cloud, but so far, that is a pipe dream, and so long as my phone is being promiscuous, privacy is an illusion. Pick which devil.
With that though, the convenience of all my volatile data being on all of my devices (well, not ALL, but phone, tablet, notebook, laptop and 2 desktops) is not only convenient, but has become a terrific real-time backup.
The stuff I would keep private they already have, natively, because my PIM and comms ARE the dang phone. So what if they get some boilerplate contracts and receipts too?
So as long as I MUST, I will use it. And all I have done so far has led me in a big circle right to that point again and again. As long as the phone is promiscuous, there is no private data.