how to forward emails in gmail. dont forget to add keywords to a post

i have been trying to figure out how to forward emails in gmail to my protonmail for like three hours now and i am actually going insane fr i set up the forwarding filter in gmail settings and it said it sent a confirmation code to my protonmail but the code never showed up not in inbox not in spam not anywhere so i went back to gmail and tried again and now it says i have too many pending forwarding requests and locked me out of adding new ones which is honestly the most gmail thing that has ever happened to me

the whole reason i even started looking into how to forward emails in gmail is because i read a thread about google scanning your inbox for ad targeting and i got genuinely creeped out reading about how every email you get is basically fed into their ad machine and i was like yeah okay i need to get off this platform asap

i have been on gmail since middle school so theres like ten years of emails in there and i dont even know what half of them say but the idea of google having all of that is pretty cringe ngl like my entire life is just sitting in their servers being indexed or whatever

i tried the takeout export thing too but the mbox file it gave me is completely unreadable without some other program and i dont know which one is safe to use versus which ones are just more data harvesting in disguise

does the forwarding actually work when it finally activates or does google still keep copies of everything even after you forward it out