Email
Pretty much everyone has a gmail account, and that's probably where google learns the most about us.
To touch on security a little, Google does something right with OAuth.
Whenever you see a "login with your google account", you are interacting with Google's OAuth.
It allows you to use an already-logged-in account from your device to sign in to a different service, reducing the attack surface for a phishing scam.
Although now that I think about it, a well placed phishing attack on the OAuth page would compromise everything...
Well, if there are any hackers reading this, please don't do this as it would be highly unethical and in direct opposition to the goals of my blog.
Back when I was making these changes for myself, I did not seriously consider self-hosting an email service.
I used to own allsparkinfinite.tk at the time, having picked it because it was free.
It is widely known that .tk websites are popular sources of scams (because they were free), so there was a reasonable chance of the entire .tk space not being accepted by email services.
Justifiably.
Yes, I chased the allure of free.
I have ended up with a story to tell for it, which I will probably get to when I talk about hosting.
I have no good reason not to host my own email now, and I will attempt it at some point in the future. For now, I will be giving tips on alternatives to gmail.
The caveat here is that these suggestions are not popular with those that demand absolute security, but the suggestions I give in this post will be doable by most people.
Based in Switzerland, with some of the best personal data protection laws, Protonmail markets itself as a privacy-focused company.
How much you believe this is, of course, entirely up to you.
For what it's worth, Proton makes security audit reports of each of their services available here
Tuta (formerly Tutanota)
Based in Germany, again with some of the best personal data protection laws, Tuta markets itself as even more of a privacy-focused company.
By the descriptions on their website, they do indeed go further than Proton when it comes to encryption and privacy. To the point that I wish I knew of their existence before I signed up with protonmail.
However, I cannot find references to security audits of Tuta on their website, so it is again up to you how much you believe them.
Not entirely a privacy solution, but have you ever had spam emails that you can't seem to unsubscribe from?
SimpleLogin allows you to create email addresses which forward to your email address. That way when you sign up with some website for a one-off thing and they start spamming you, you can simply turn it off by deactivating that alias.
There is a self-hosted option with this, which I will be covering along with my email self-hosting guide.
Office Suite
MSOffice used to be the most popular option here, but it's Google Docs these days.
Yay, more Google.
Keeping with the spirit of "there is no cloud, there is only someone else's computer", I would strongly recommend storing your documents on your device.
The solution I've been using for as long as I've been using Linux is LibreOffice.
It does pretty much everything you need from an Office Suite, costs less than MS Office, and gives you more control over your data than Google Docs.
Of course, sharing and simultaneous editing is a problem when your files reside on your computer, and collaborating has become important in recent times. The solution there is Collabora Office, which is a self-hostable alternative to Google Docs, in the shared editing sense.
I will be putting up a tutorial for this along with the Nextcloud tutorial.
Of course, your mileage may vary, based on how resistant you and your collaborators would be to switch to Collabora, but at least make the attempt to keep your individual files on your device with LibreOffice.