Selfhosted

Well i kinda did that when i started selfhosting way too much a number of years ago... it can be quite annoying trying to get your server out of blocklists (if you need to change servers, because of ip reusing from hosters) and unless you use something like Servercow, it is easy to break things and it kinda hard to find proper tooling for selfservice and stuff.. nowadays i mostly keep it like it is because i don't want to deal with trying to migrate people to a different setup. It's okey and most of the time it just does it job, but it doesn't give too much joy :P

I have run my own email server, and have worked in the commercial web hosting sector.

Honestly, I wouldn't run your own email except as a side project.

It's certainly possible and all the tools are available and easy enough to use, but email in general is a rough combo of super old, and a "big target".

The super old part means that a lot of things that we might consider standard for a modern federated system just aren't there for email. Security is profoundly lacking, and if something gets dropped because of an update, or your computer crashed, there's no guarantee that the system will find a way to get it to you, and the sender might not even know it didn't get to you.

Security wise, you basically have to set everything up correctly all at once, or some system somewhere between you and the recipient will just throw the messages away, and they may or may not tell you.
They do this because all the tools are old, crufty and there's a lot of good exploits that misconfiguration leaves open that automated tools can use to send spam.

Be sure to keep your computer fully patched, and install a malware scanner, even on Linux.

Ultimately, I wouldn't bother running one because the ratio of reward to work is just off for me. I would recommend setting something up for an afternoon though, just so you can see how the pieces work, and get to send yourself an email and know what steps it took.

@DidacticDumbass I use hosted email from Polaris Email, $25/yr, and my domain from Porkbun at $5 for the first year, and access the mail through Thunderbird on phone and computer.

As much as I enjoy self hosting my own services, email just seems like more trouble than it's worth. I let Protonmail take care of that for me.

I run my own Mailserver on a vps with mailcow dockerized. Was a real pain to set up, even through it mostly works right now.

DNS stuff isn't just some A or AAAA records, also txt stuff reverse DNS and much more. As the others said, that's completely impossible with a regular ISP.

I'm on some dumb blacklist because my IP is obviously in the IP range of my hosting provider, and some lists generally block all vps ranges.

Now imagine the following: your bank wants to contact you and your primary mail is selfhosted, for some reason they block your IP (yes outgoing blocks, those idiots) and you don't get some real important mail. Or your server is down for maintenance, certificate issues, so on.

The best solution is most probably letting a professional email holster take care of your domain, for email at least. Protonmail offers that but the problem I have with them is that they don't allow a regular login through thunderbird, restricted to their own software.

I just decommissioned the mail server I was running, because I didn't have the capacity with the rest of life to keep on top of it. Mailu was my choice of suite, and it was really great once I figured out how to get it behaving nicely behind my reverse proxy. For the most part it was low maintenance, but I would occasionally have issues with cert renewal and subsequently my email clients would stop connecting. I didn't have issues with non-delivery once I set up the various DNS records and did a lot of test emails that I could mark as not junk to various providers. I ended up switching to using icloud+, which includes email with a custom domain. Would I host my own email again? Possibly if I really need more than 6 addresses. But icloud+ costs less per month than the power consumption of the tiny server I was running mailu on over 3 days. Which is... Not insignificant in the current financial climate.

I'm using openbsd with dovcot, opensmtpd on a pi. I used mailhardener to get it scoring well. I've had no issues with it getting flagged.

“No. No, man. Hell no. No, i imagine someone would get their ass kicker if they said something like that”

Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.

I used to run my own mail server about 2 years ago but unfortunately the spam got so bad I didn't have the time to manage all the filters. I moved over to ProtonMail since I can still use my own domain there. So I guess I would say it's not really worth it also it really sucks if your power is out and not having access to sent your power company a strongly worded email.

Yes please visit me at http://retarded.dev