Selfhosted

I did for a couple years, but moved to mailbox.org a while ago. The effort was much to high to save a few bucks and there is no real upside to it. E-Mail is a troublesome mixture of different protocols from the internet stone age held together by chewing gum (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, database or file storage, maybe ActiveSync, Web-Mailer, ...)

Even when everything is up and running there is always maintenance to keep your SSL certificates up to date, update your incoming spam filter technique, keep other mail providers assured that you are not spamming (DKIM, etc.), keep all the different system services (see above) up to date and interoperable, etc. and every few years when you want to move to a new server, provider or Linux distro you start it all over again.

I did but I stopped. My server had everything set up (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Spam filtering) but I gave up after some providers wanted me to jump through hoops to get my mail delivered. Also I never had enough outgoing mail to build some reputation.

@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.

I used to. I had a docker-mailserver. It was good. But I moved house and changed ISP. I couldn't set up the reverse DNS on my address, and Gmail was blocking me, so I had to switch to a hosted mail server (namecheap private email).

It's a shame, syncing is noticably slower, and I only get one mailbox, but oh well. Just keep on using GPG.

there are many replies saying similar things, but don't be discouraged from try it out. i host my own with mailinabox on a vm from a cloud provider. no spam issues. the only wildcard was spending a few months getting my ip address off google's spam filters. it is so worth it, i own my own email/calendar/contacts/notes/todo list/ AND website solution. all with mailinabox. completely disconnected from google etc.

Running a mail server these days is not that difficult. While using pre-assembled stacks like mailcow only the DNS entries needs to be done. If you want to run it at home you should do some research on routing all the traffic through a wireguard tunnel to preserve a public IP other mail instances will accept

I feel like I'll eventually have to... mailbox.org upped their prices from 1 EUR/mo to... whatever they are right now, and on top of that I'll still need a VPN to access heinous sites such as pastebin (welcome to Turkey), which is another 5 EUR/mo.

For that money I could get an alright enough VPS from Hetzner and spend some time getting everything configured properly, and have bonus flexibility in terms of hosting anything else I might want to host.

The problem with this ofc is that no "turnkey" mail bundle seems to give a shit about resource usage as far as I'm aware, and I'm worried they'll end up hogging all the server resources for themselves.

I do. Run about a half dozen email servers for various organizations. Been doing it for almost a decade for some. Other than initial setup pain, I've had zero problems others describe. I have used (and still run) docker-mailserver, mailcow, mail-in-a-box and mailu. All are lovely in their own way and fit various use cases better than others.

Gotta say, I’m really happy to see so many people here actually talking about doing it! Usually I see a lot of fear-mongering about self hosting email. You can do it, though, and I think we should encourage more people to do so! It can be a little tricky to set up at first because there’s a lot of different things you need to configure and make talk to each other — I haven’t used them but there’s things like mail-in-a-box that are supposed to make this easier. But the most important thing is to make sure you set up SPF, DMARC, and DKIM DNS records (and set up DKIM signing for your outgoing messages). I’d recommend setting the ruf and rua tags in the DMARC record so you get mailed reports from other mail servers (can help you debug if your mail is getting rejected). I’d also use these tools:

https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.learndmarc.com/

Happy mailing :)

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.

Hosting a mail server is really easy. Making sure Hotmail, Gmail and others accept your emails is a nightmare.

I don't host my own email, I just delegate my email management to a small provider.

I host my own mailserver, and to be honest it's pretty painless. Usually I just let it run without giving it any thought. It's on rare occasions that I need to put a bit of work into improving the inbound spam scanning.

Selfhosting does need quite some knowledge of the software stack and several additional protocols to set them up correctly to get your outgoing email delivered. Also, like already mentioned in another comment, you absolutely need an IP address from a non-blacklisted subnet (I think most VPS providers will be okay, residential definitely not).

My software stack: Arch Linux (soon NixOS), Postfix, Dovecot, rspamd, opendkim, opendmarc.

Additional techniques configured: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC.

As you can see it's quite a lot, and I've been doing for more than 20 years now, so my opinion can be a bit skewed. I'd say go for it if selfhosting is a hobby.

Not likely worth it. Primary reason is that the large federated email services are skeptical 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 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 want to do a setup where i use mailcow at home for receiving emails but Amazon ses SMTP for sending, it's possible? Looks like it is, but i didn't investigate it