As I keep exploring alternatives to Google services, I'm now looking into which email services can replace the almighty Gmail. I won't be looking at other big companies services, such as Outlook.com, since they have the same weird practices as Google. Let's look at our options !

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Why quitting gmail
Gmail is a great service. It's free, it has plenty of storage, uses labels, allows to archive messages, and generally looks pretty good. It's also using all your data and reading all your emails. That's the main problem, for me.

Proton Mail
It's a solution designed to be as private as possible, where everything is encrypted, and no information is shared.
Your email account can be created without giving any personal info, and it is of course open source as well.
Proton Mail has a free tier, limited to 500Mb of storage and 150 emails per day, which is more than enough for my needs. More demanding users can part with about 4 euros a month, upping the storage to 5gb and 1000 emails per day. This tier also allows you to use your own email domain, and create up to 5 email addresses.

Interface-wise, Proton Mail looks alright. It doesn't have the clean, nice look of Gmail or Outlook.com, and the colors are not really to my tastes, but if you feel like it, you can use custom CSS to style it the way you like.

Proton mail can import your contacts, but unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any sync options with third party clients. The whole thing being encrypted makes regular email clients unable to read or access anything. There is an application, called Proton Bridge, that allows you to sync your email on a client, but it only works on Thunderbird, and is still in beta.

Net - Courier
Net C, or Net courrier, is a european mail provider. They not only provide an email service, but also some storage space (500Mo by default), an adress book, calendar, and photo storage service.
Creating an account is free, and lets you pick the domain name between a bunch of different propositions.

The TLDR is that free accounts are subjected to ads through third party cookies, including targeted ads, and premium accounts are not. Net-C won't read your emails, though, to offer ads specifically taileord to what you wrote or received.

Looks-wise, Net-C isn't that great, with a huge header, and boxy design, but it's clear enough, and can be customized, with different colors and sizes.
If you don't like the webmail, though, you can sync email with any IMAP capable client, as well as the calendar with caldav and ICS, and the address book with carddav. Net-C also supports Exchange Active Sync if you're into that sort of thing.

Even the storage space can be accessed remotely through FTP or WebDav ! This is great, since it means that your Net-C email, contacts, and calendar can be synced with any client you'd like to use, thus escaping the ads present in the webmail.

Net-C offers a Premium package, for 12 euros a year. This includes 20 Go of email storage, 5 Go of cloud storage, the removal of ads, as well as the access to the POP3 protocol for mail syncing.

If you want more cloud storage, you can buy a "cloud pack", but prices are pretty high, with 500Go costing 40€ per month, so I'd recommend finding another solution.

Zoho Mail
Zoho is a big company, providing services ranging from email, to a full blown CRM, to online document editing, project management, and many, many more. Zoho Mail is a full featured solution, integrating a mailbox, contacts, a calendar, tasks, and notes. Zoho guarantees privacy, and does not use or collect your data outside of what it needs to actually provide you the email account.
Interface-wise, Zoho looks more modern than the other services I tried before.

The free personal account includes your "@zoho.com" email adress, as well as no ads, two factor authentication, imap and Pop sync for email, and caldav sync for calendar. Zoho is a highly configurable service, with a ton of preferences.

Free tier users get 5GB of mail storage, but you can upgrade, with prices ranging from 3$ a month for 30gb, to 6$ a month for 100Gb. Both these tiers include access to a ton more Zoho services, and the prices are pretty reasonable even for an individual user

Conclusion
There are other email providers out there, but these are the ones that stuck with me. For more privacy-focused users, Proton Mail seems like the obvious choice. It has its limits, such a syncing with other clients, but this is the price to pay for full email encryption.

I now hesitate between Zoho and Net-C. On the one hand, Zoho seems like a full featured replacement for a lot of other google services, such as Drive, Docs, Keep, and many more. On the other hand, Net-C seems like a great independant solution, and is more in keeping with the "one provider per service" approach I'm looking for.

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Street Artist Oriol Arumi

By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain.

Oriol Arumí (Vic, 31 October 1972) is a Catalan painter and muralist living in the city of Lleida. His work is technically straddling between figurative and abstract art, and thematically between reality and fantasy. This gives him a wide range of possibilities that allows him to do completely what he likes at any given time: “I always have in mind painters as varied as Johannes Vermeer, Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt and Joan Miró, not to mention of sketchers like Hergé or Moebius ”.

instagram.com/p/CErm2yrirAg/

After we reviewed a few services that allow you to switch from Google's, it's time to move on to something a bit more complex, but more secure as well: hosting your own services ! To do so, there is something fantastic, that can replicate most of what Google offers: NextCloud. It's not only a file storage solution, but it can also handle email, photos, music, calendar, an online office suite, and a lot more, since it has a giant gallery of apps that you can add to your own instance !

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Commands:

Create a user:
adduser "YOUR USERNAME"

Give it the sudo permissions:
usermod -aG sudo "YOUR USERNAME"

Log out of the root user:
logout

Install Nextcloud:
sudo snap install nextcloud

Setting up the server
There are plenty of ways you can go about doing that. You could use an older computer, a rasperry Pie, or any machine at your house, and turn it into a server by installing the server version of your distro of choice. If you don't want to mess with that or you don't want to configure too many things, you can also turn yourself to cloud-hosted server providers, which is exactly what I'll do. There are plenty around, some geared towards having more storage space, some providing powerful GPUs for distributed calculations, and some oriented towards CPU power. Here, I'll be createing an entry-level server with Linode. I bet you didn't see that one coming !

Most providers will allow you to pick between pre-selected distro to install, or will let you choose a custom one to put on the server. For servers, debian-based distros are often the most robust, as are everything based on Red Hat. But here, Ubuntu has a distinct advantage over most other available options: you can install nextcloud with just one command line, thanks to snap. I know some of you aren't fans of this technology, but it's honestly the easiest option here. I'll be going with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, which should be stable and perform perfectly well.

Here, I'll pick a small Linode, called a Nanode, since I don't plan on using my server for file storage, but if you're planning on replacing Google Photos or Google Drive with Nextcloud, you should get something with a bigger hard drive. Most providers also allow you to add storage to your existing server afterwards, so no worries.

Creating a user
Once your server is created, and your distro has booted, you can access its console to install whatever you need. That's where we'll be installing Nextcloud through snap. To begin, we'll need to create a user that is not the superuser, called Root, so we'll login as root to do that. Enter "root" as the login, and the root password you selected when you created your server.
If you installed Ubuntu on your own server, you probably already created a user during the distro's installation, so skip that step !

We'll just type "adduser", followed by a space, and the name of the user we want to create. We'll have to answer a few questions such as the user's full name and its password. The rest is not important here.
Our user does not have the rights to run super user commands, which we'll need to install anything, so we'll start by adding our new user to the sudoers group.

Let's type usermod -aG sudo. followed by a space then the name of the user.

And we're done ! Now, we just type logout, to quit being root, and login as our new user, just by typing its username and password.

Installing Nextcloud and logging in
Using SNAP, it's only one command line:
sudo snap install nextcloud

Once the command has completed its task, we'll need to access our nextcloud instance. Simply get the IP address of your server. To do so, either look in your server manager, if you're using a cloud provider, or type:
ifconfig

Your server's IP address is the first series of numbers in the first line.

Copy and paste that in a browser's window to access your nextcloud instance. You'll be asked to create an admin account, so just the username and password you'll want to use to manage your nextcloud instance, and you're in !

Now, this method is pretty easy, but is has one drawback: it will install using its own HTTP and mysql server, so if you want to use the same machine for something else on top of nextcloud, you'll run two servers at the same time, which is not that efficient, but for our simple purposes here, it's not an issue.

And that's it ! Now you have a nextcloud instance up and running. You can explore its various settings, the apps you can install on it, all from the gear menu in the top right corner. I highly recommend you register a domain name and install an SSL certificate, so your server uses HTTPS instead of HTTP, it will be a lot more secure.