I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap.

I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap>

It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it.

You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ...

I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirm the other party actually got it.

Before self-hosting your own, first get a domain and just point it at a mail provider that allows custom domains. It will cost, but so will a VPS. I suspect a lot of DIY homelab types would have most of their needs met with just that setup:

- you get the vanity email address

- you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on)

- you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider)

Most of the setup consists of steps you will have to take anyway when self-hosting (getting a domain, changing DNS records), except for a major amount of headaches that will be taken care of for you.

I started self-hosting my email server earlier this year. I use maddy[0] as my email server and route outgoing mail through MailPace[1] to avoid being memory-holed (despite having SPF and DKIM set up correctly).

My reason for self-hosting is control, not privacy: the fact that the cleartext of my outbound emails is visible in the MailPace UI is not a concern; the problem I'm solving is that email providers can delete your account.

[0] https://maddy.email/

[1] https://mailpace.com/

I know an old-school Linux admin who has been successfully running his own email servers for 30+ years - from small private ones to larger corporate setups. For spam detection he uses his own system, and it works surprisingly well even without any LLM (though an LLM could surely make it even better). So the "you can't self-host email" meme was never quite true - it is about willingness and ability to configure everything right.

The biggest problem with self-hosting a mail server is reliably being able to send email and have it be delivered to the recipient. Something I have been thinking about setting up is self-hosting a dovecot server so that all of my emails that I receive are on my system, but using another provider for sending email. I don't send that many emails, so there is not much privacy loss in regards to a third-party being able to see my sent emails, but I still get the benefit of noone but me having access to my received emails.

I've hosted and actively used my own email server for > 10 years and there are two things that are true at the same time:

It is absolutely possible to host, use, and achieve decent deliverability with your own server. It takes work and is a different beast than running a webserver, but that frontier is not dead (yet).

At the same time: it is an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA to suggest that folks operate an email server out of residential IP through your ISP. The spam prevention ecosystem is so draconian now that email traffic flowing out of address ranges belonging to residential owners is yeeted into the sun. If you've operated email infrastructure at decently large scales, you know that SPF/DKIM/DMARC are just one part of how spam is identified, and mixing in the source of email traffic into the detection heuristics is a significant part of that identification process. Achieving decent delivery can often involve "warming up" an IP over time to establish its reputation, and consumer address ranges are a hodge-podge of activity that incur very little trust about what they're doing.

I agree with some commenters that exhort the exercise of self-hosting email to prevent the venerable protocol becoming a homogeneous GMail and Outlook-only world, but there are reliable ways to do this: using a VPS, relying on a company for the sending/SMTP part, or something similar. But footguns abound, and disgorging SMTP packets from your LAN edge is one of them.

Every single person I know who has run their own email server has, at one point or another, either outright lost mails or had important mails delayed for days.

It's not worth it.

I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm

I've been self-hosting for 20 years now - a few years ago I switched to using Mail-in-a-Box (https://mailinabox.email/) which makes management a lot easier than configuring each service manually.

It definitely requires some effort but once you've got it up and running it's pretty hands off. The only issues I've ever had are expiring certs but I've fixed that by configuring auto-renewals and it's all good now.

Ensuring your source IP isn't blacklisted is probably the single most important factor. I had to request a new IP from Linode where my server runs as the one it was originally assigned had a bad reputation.

Ive self-hosted my email server since 1999. It started in a closet at home in San Francisco. As things got more restrictive (residential ips being black holes) I moved to a Colo. but now I'm back to hosting it on my server in my cellar. I have a fixed ip from my provider init7 (Switzerland) that has never been blacklisted. Reverse dns is set up. All the acronyms like spf, dkim, dmarc are set up. I have no problems sending to Microsoft and Google email addresses.

So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.