[sksksk]

With self hosting email, if the digital sovreignty aspect is more important to you than the privacy aspect...

What I do is use gmail with a custom domain, self host an email server, and use mbysnc[1] to always be downloading my emails from gmail. Then I connect to that email server for reading my emails, but still use gmail for sending.

It also means that google can't lock me out of my emails, I still retain all my emails, and if I want move providers, I simply change the DNS records of my domain. But I don't have any issues around mail delivery.

[npodbielski]

I did all of those DNS shnigannas with spf, dmarc and others ones like 6 years ago.

I think I had problems with my emails like 2 twice , with one exchange server of some small recruitment company. I think it was misconfigured.

Ah there were also some problem with gmail at the beginning they banned my domain because I was sending test emails to my own account there. I had to register my domain on their BS email post master tools website and configure my DNS with some key.

In overall I had much more problem with automatic backups, services going down for no reason, IPs being dynamic and etc. Email server just works.

[carlosjobim]

The custom domain is all you need for complete e-mail sovereignty. As long as you have it, you can select between hundreds (thousands?) of providers, and take your business elsewhere at any time.

[sksksk]

You risk losing your historical emails if you don’t back them up somewhere

[jraph]

Why not also do the sending? Deliverability concerns?

[singron]

Not OP, but yes. For personal use, you don't have enough traffic to establish reputation, so you get constantly blocked regardless of DKIM/DMARC/SPF/rDNS. Receiving mail is reliable though, so you can do that yourself and outsource just sending to things like Amazon SES or SMTP relays.

[sksksk]

Yep exactly, it removes a whole class of potentially problems.

Doing the sending myself wouldn't improve my digital sovreignty, which is my primary motivation.