Nice workup on getting off the Google train. I still have a Gmail account, but never use it. If I didn’t have my own domains, and e-mail to go with them, I would be on FastMail. I have heard nothing but good things about the service, and US $40/year for 15GB of storage, plus all their other features, is a great deal.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo exclusively as my search engine for quite a while now. The service has gotten much better from its early days, when I still had to go back to Google some times to find the link I was looking for. My backup these days is Bing. Microsoft is slightly less scary than Google only because they are not interested (yet) in selling my search data to advertisers.