I've always browsed in a sandbox only, since the revelations however I also bought a couple of vps and now tunnel my traffic through one of the servers. This is a very cheap measure, 15$ a month, that probably increases your privacy but also attracts more attention to yourself. A more inconspicuous solution is probably a public vpn service, but those servers are not under your control and you won't be able to make sure that the service does what the advertisements promise.

I don't bother much with email encryption or pgp, I've written down email as a loss in the privacy department and don't bother with trying/hoping my emails are private. So my gmail/hotmail/yahoo inboxes are for fluffy stuff only that doesn't really matter.

Mostly if I need to securely communicate with someone it will be on a private irc server where everybody has his/her own certificates and I can check to see if the server is untouched etc.