Just about a couple of days I started my quest for the same goals, I want to try to get out of google's services, and I've found quite a lot of good options for gmail and calendar alternatives.
For using your own domain you can go with
http://www.zoho.com/mail/ that will host for you the domain for email and some other stuff.
If you are concerned about security, then hushmail is what you need, you could also try and see if it's possible to host your domain there.
Or use a combination of both using forwarding.
There are a few more I've found that are cool too, lavabit, as someone mentioned is also good but too basic for the free version (mailbox size too small)
Others also offer unlimited storage, so you can decide what is the most important feature you're looking for
Here's a few others to try: gmx, alternative fuse,
mail.com (with zillions of different domains to chose from), fastmail.
There are a lot more, such as hotmail and yahoo, but they're not different from gmail, also big companies behind them, which I don't like. You may find a lot more, search for gmail alternatives and give them all a spin, that's what I did, now I have 5 more email inboxes, I will play with them for a while and then decide which one I will pick, I think I tend to prefer the hushmail one, it's the most security and privacy oriented one...
I'm still looking for a way to give up social networks such as facebook and google plus, but still being able to keep myself updated, I've heard about
identi.ca and reddit, I'd like to hear some more alternatives.
For example, what could replace my igoogle page, which I find very useful, mostly for concentrating my preferred RSS and some other customized stuff.
Please share with us your suggestions
Thanks
TuxSax
____________________________________________________________
I'm an FSF member - Help us support software freedom! Join us!On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Ramana Kumar
<ramana.kumar@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear LibrePlanet
I use Gmail and Google Calendar heavily, via the web interface.
I have been thinking about trying out Thunderbird and Lightning instead, to slowly migrate my life to less dependence on non-free software and services.
I believe I can try these pieces of software with my existing Gmail address and calendar data.
Does anyone have experience with that, or know a good guide to setting them up?
However, I'm also interested in what a completely free life would look like.
I have my own domain, xrchz.net, which doesn't point anywhere.
I also have an email address, ramana@member.fsf.org, which currently forwards to Gmail.
If I wanted to use ramana@xrchz.net or ramana@member.fsf.org as my primary email address, without using Google's mail services, how could I go about doing that?
Is there a good free and libre mail server I could use?
Or what other options are there?
Similarly, where could I host my calendar so I could update it from any computer on the internet (including, say, my office computer and my phone), and also (less important) share it with certain other people?
I hope someone on list knows the answers to these questions :)
I don't think they're difficult, but probably the information isn't concentrated in a single place because there's no company who wants everyone to switch to using "their libre services" (which may be a contradiction in terms, but maybe not given AGPL...)
Anyway, I'm curious but pretty technically confused at the moment.
Cheers,
Ramana