I’m beginning a long process of trying to move away from as many Google services as I can. Here is what I am now using:

Email – Atmail Cloud

I was lucky enough to stumble upon their offering right around the time I was really looking to move my personal and business email accounts elsewhere and they fit the bill. I can host many different domains from the same account, take care of forwarding accounts, and a lot more.

They offer ActiveSync and IMAP (which were requirements) and a lot more that I don’t use. So far besides some growing pains with the new service they have been working very well. Support has been great and I have even had the pleasure of talking with a real human being so far.

Would recommend.

Calendar & Contacts – iCloud

I was going to switch everything over to MobileMe, but Apple changed everything again and now I’m working with iCloud.

I keep my personal, business, and work calendars within iCloud and sync everything between my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad. Along with that I share calendars with my wife. I’ve never had any issues, plus it is now free.

I do the same thing with my contacts and it works the same way. I’ve never had any issues and I hope they don’t now show up.

Search – DuckDuckGo

Sadly, this is the one place where I will probably not be able to get away. While DuckDuckGo has worked pretty well, the lack of image search and the slowness of the queries really is hard to swallow. There are things that I like, and it is really clean and infinite scrolling can be nice, but the deficiencies are enough to likely push me back to Google.

Telephony – Google Voice

Is there anyone else that can just give me a forwarding number for free?

Closing

In closing, I’ve been relatively successful so far in moving away from Google’s other services, but there are areas where they really excel (and search is the main one). I’ll keep looking, but right now I’m happy that my email, calendar, and contacts have now been moved away.