Selfhosted

@DidacticDumbass
Yes I run my own mailserver. I have done it for the last 15 years or so.

I'm also running my own Friendica instance.

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

I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)

Not likely worth it. Primary reason is that the large federated email services are skeptic also of email from services such as your proposed self hosting solution and may simply not deliver the mail you send. This is to mitigate against spammers setting up a bespoke servers.

There are a bunch of other things that could go wrong if you don’t set everything up perfectly, but even if you do, this would be a big problem.

Better off using a custom domain with a big provider. Fewer headaches. I like Fastmail, but many others are great too.

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.

Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails. If a remote email server is trying to contact your email server and it can't it's only going to retry a few times and then give up. Hosting this yourself sounds great until you realize high uptime is not cheap and requires constant attention.

Setting it up securely can be difficult depending on your understanding of server infrastructure as well as protocols like DNS. You need to set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc in order to prevent someone from faking an email from your server.

Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation). Open email servers were common 20 years ago but very rare today. That makes setup easier, but the main caveat is that most known non-federated email servers will reject email from servers that don't have SPF/DKIM/DMARC because they generally end up being havens for bots and spam since there is no verification or authenticity of the sender.

As someone who self hosts a lot of things, I would never self host my email. If i did I would be paying for two boxes in different parts of the world on different ISPs to provide that uptime. I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.

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