I've been using startpage and duckduckgo for a year now and both work great. All my company emails are under gmail and the plan is to change that in the near future. But what is the best alternative to gmail? I guess I could google it 
That all depends on how you use it, and what other Spoo-gle services are integrated, that you use regularly.
Do you require end to end encryption and perfect forward secrecy, or for work, do you just need something that can replace the services you now regularly use ?
I've looked over that page
@Juan dropped - very good starter page for those interested.
(Thank You juan.)
Here's one for you though, how often do you use LinkdIn, twitter, faceplant, or the Disqus comment systems on websites you visit ?
Those are Javascript webbugs that track everything you do - even when you're not logged in.
This is one of the reasons I recommend using a JS blocker.
Privacy issues have been noted as inherent in the use of services like Disqus, which serve their content through third-party JavaScript widgets.
As with other embedded web widgets, such as like buttons, the Disqus widget acts as a web bug which tracks a user's activities, even when they are not logged in, across different sites that use the Disqus commenting system. Information tracked by Disqus, which may be disclosed to third parties, includes pseudonymous analytics data, such as a user's IP address, their web browser version and installed add-ons, and their referring pages and exit links. Although these data are referred to by Disqus as "Non-Personally Identifiable Information", such data, when aggregated, has been shown to be usable for de-anonymizing users.
Disqus has also been criticized for publishing its registered users' entire commenting histories, along with a list of connected blogs and services, on the publicly viewable user profile pages. The option to keep profile activity private was later added.
Disqus does moderate communities which use its service, by treating some comments as spam, when clearly they are not, in other words, it censors political comment, possibly by key word detection, leading to controversial moderation in some communities.[original research?] Disqus not only intervenes when the Terms of Service have been violated, leading to criticisms that Disqus allows racist and otherwise offensive content to be created on the platform.[clarification needed]
Disqus also was criticized for not giving users control over who follows them. Prior to 2014, any user could follow any other user, but a user being followed could not control or block who was following them, which led to harassment among some users
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus2013 security breach
In 2013 a Swedish group called Researchgruppen obtained and exposed a large number of anonymous Disqus identities through the application programming interface (API).[32] The group cooperated with the Bonnier tabloid Expressen, who subsequently visited some of the commentators in their homes, confronting them with allegedly racist, misogynic, and derogatory sentiments. Researchgruppen said their database contained millions of comments from Disqus users around the world who are at risk of de-anonymization. ... In March 2014, Expressen and Researchgruppen won the investigative reporting award Guldspaden.
October 2017 security breach
On October 6, 2017, Disqus announced that a snapshot of its database from 2012, containing 17.5 million users' email addresses, login names and sign-up dates from between 2007-2012, had been exposed. ... The data dump also included, for about a third of the affected accounts, passwords that had been salted and hashed with SHA1...
Disqus has been found to automatically add their affiliate referral code to links on the containing webpage, even converting plain text into links in order to add affiliate codes. Disqus also injects untrusted and potentially dangerous third party advertising code into containing webpages
So, yeah. Removing Spoo-gle is a good start, but just a start.
Anything you do to protect yourself, is a good thing, but it takes work, and ads inconvenience, for most people.
(I never allow Google fonts to run, and just recently, I turned off spell-checker in the browser.)
This is a good thread though, Thanks for starting it.
(I'll be adding to it when I come across pertinent articles.)
