As of late its hard not to be disappointed with Googles new attitude to its customers, it's a real disappointment that they no longer hold to their original mission statement. What with forcing customers to use "social media" whether they want to or not, and shuttering useful services again to funnel people into making life easier for ID thieves, its no longer a surprise that an increasing number of people are parting from Google.
At the end of the day its actually not too hard to configure a cheap VPS to give you all the important cloud tools that you need to ease you away from Googles cloud.
Here's a list of things you'll need
I'd recommend using the Evolution suite to help set up and verify all your services as although its rather heavy weight an unwieldy you can at least verify mail, contacts and calendar all from one place...
Assuming your VPS doesn't have a cardDav/calDav server available from its control panel you'll need to install one. I'd recommend you give radicale a try, nice and slim without fluff it provides both cardDav and calDav.
From here on in for any examples I'll use the user name auser
I found the easiest way to ensure some clients can defiantly see a cardDav and calDav server is to make some dummy data files.
touch /etc/radicale/collections/auser/calendar.ics touch /etc/radicale/collections/auser/AddressBook.vcf
depending on your client you will need a URI of
http://bedroomcoders.co.uk:5232/auser/AddressBook.vcf http://bedroomcoders.co.uk:5232/auser/calendar.ics http://bedroomcoders.co.uk:5232/auser/
some will only need the last URI as they can query the server and pick up the available databases where as some will need explicitly pointing to a database... Now when I say database really we are just talking about flat textfiles, but in effect they are a store of data.
Have a good read of the doc for radicale it's a snip to setup - depending on the reliability of your VPS you should be able to just kick it off and forget about it, but if you need to be really sure of it you may want to make a bunch of runlevel scripts... ( I do find that the odd server without runlevel scripts gives you a good idea of the reliability of your VPS)
Once you are sure you have IMAP (most VPS usually come with webmail) and your DAV services running and verified with Evolution, you can move on to your android device...
When reflashing you android device you will first need to format /system from recovery as well as wiping user data (formating /data), this should give you a clean start without a whole bunch of google apps you don't need and a noticeable boost in battery life as a result! You need to look out for "roms" with separate a "google apps" zip
One big gottcha with the android email app is that if offline it will look like its sent an email but seemingly just loose it - really poor show! - I need to check out IMAP/SMTP apps to look out for one thats a tad more careful...
Speaking of apps I cannot recommend fdroid enough (lxquick it for the url) as well as side loading the the fdroid app its worth looking at the site.
While the good people fdroid apparently do some basic auditing of code (as I understand it) setting privacy guard on by default for cyanogenmod and using a firewall should serve to protect you from any rare rogues... and you know what in the long run you're probably safer using even precompiled open source code compared with googles app store - where there is NO auditing and NO public eyes on code...
I found droidDav a very good tool, which when I get some spare cash I'll probably donate to, basically it provides you a google type "account" which uses cardDav and calDav to sync with the respective android apps. Its bright enough to query the server and so you don't need to point it at any specific files.
So that's it then all divorced from Google then, well for me not entirely at least for the life of my Nexus 7 tablet - I've removed the gmail app and left just enough on it so the google framework works so I can still use google play, I'd have liked a copy of GTA SA in perpetuity, but then as things are going before long I'll have a Linux based tablet or some such that can emulate a PC good enough for my original PC copy of GTA SA....