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Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Just passing along what I've read many times: that self hosting email can be difficult. Particularly sending, because the large providers tend to treat email from less known sources with more skepticism (such as by marking as spam), even with properly configured SPF and DKIM.
And if your server is down, you may miss any incoming mail for the duration. I don't know if other providers would try resending after a period of time if the receiver is unreachable, but I doubt it (just an educated guess).
I love self hosting services but email is something I've decided not to touch with a ten foot pole.
It’s harder than a beginner would expect, but also not as bad as everybody says. It’s doable and we shouldn’t discourage everybody from trying it (but don’t use it for anything important until you’re sure it works). Just make sure you set up SPF / DKIM / DMARC and rDNS properly and you’ll most likely be fine. If you’re scared or frustrated you can use a relay for send. Receiving is easy.
Just a quick add: even for my self hosted services, I configure Postfix with Mailgun for SMTP relay for alerts and whatnot just to ensure delivery to my external mail provider.
Edit: a few words for clarity
To be fair, the SMTP RFC (5321) says that senders MUST retry sending upon a failure (source), but it only specifies that they SHOULD have a retry of 30 minutes, and an even weaker recommendation to continue to try for 4-5 days before giving up.