[jbg_]

There's a recurring theme in the discussion of this (and actually any time there is a discussion about email), that self-hosting email is really hard. That hasn't been my experience. I've been self-hosting four mail accounts (with moderate to high usage) on one server since about 2007. I briefly tried gmail when it came out but never switched to it.

In 11 years of self-hosting my mail I've had one deliverability problem, which was when outlook.com users stopped receiving our mail. I wrote to outlook.com, and it was resolved within 24 hours. This is possibly because my server is located in a reputable, but relatively small, datacentre, and not on the likes of AWS.

I use the zen.spamhaus.org DNS blacklist to reject connections from spammers outright, and do SPF checks. These two methods alone (no Bayesian or similar filtering) mean I get about one spam message per two days on average, which I just delete.

I estimate that I spend about half an hour a month on keeping the server up-to-date etc.

I consider the downsides extremely small in comparison to the benefits of controlling your own email setup. I encourage anyone with even basic server administration skills to try it. Email is a fantastically decentralised system and we should take advantage of that.

[Tepix]

Yep. When you setup your server with a project such as sovereign you get great, secure defaults and day-to-day maintenance is minimal. Mostly keeping debian packages updated and upgrading the distribution every couple of years.

[nvarsj]

Until gmail/outlook/yahoo start silently blocking a percentage of your emails for some obscure reason. It’s really hard to get self hosted email right - it is very user hostile.