Iirc hosting your own mailboxes is easy. Making sure others can actually get your sent emails is a pain in the arse. It’s a cartel.

One thing you should know, the SMTP protocol is designed to work with intermittent network connections like modem, each email has several days of grace period, with many retries, so you don’t need 99.999% uptime.

I host my email on a hetzner VPS using dovecot+postfix and thus far no issues.

I don’t really understand why people are so against it, for me it took an evening to set up and haven’t touched its configuration since.

I know the feeling. I’ve self-hosted my email for a number of years. I’m currently migrating it to a new server and there are many living parts. I would use something like Docker since that’s easie rto migrate or upgrade. But the VPS I’m using barely has any RAM.

I self-host a metric fuck tonne of services and (with my extensive email background) I choose to outsource my email services.

You CAN do it today. But should you? Given DMARC, SPF, etc… No.

Since I left Gmail’s free GAFYD feature, I moved to Fastmail (Australian) years ago. Does it cost money? Yes. Does it do everything I want? Yes. Does it have features Google would never provide? Yes.

Do I have any reservations or regrets? No.

Thank you for posting this as I was not being able to access my work email was some internal issue. I would never have know as I cannot receive an update email!

I picked mailbox.org, configured it once and havent thought much about it since then, almost 2 years ago now

This post was a great reminder, i should probably reup my subscription soon…

Best I can figure, choose a company that has well established general hosting services and get email through them.

It’s going ro be really interesting to see if Thunderbird is able to make a good alternative. I really like the direction they are going, but time will tell if is sustainable for them and users alike.

Personally, I’m using Hostinger, which is reasonable and reliable.

Some people are relying on specialty private email providers like Proton or Tuta, but I have a big dose of skepticism. Lots of people are canceling their Proton subscriptions, and Tuta depends on using their clients because of the secure way it’s built.

I would not be interested in attempting to self-host email. The service itself is trivial for an experienced network person (which I’m not), but the big picture is impossibly complex. There is a complicated and somewhat opaque reputation system that will arbitrarily block a lot of self-hosted email services. Some people have found ways to make it work, but it always seems pretty tenuous to me.

As far as email archiving, I highly recommend self-hosted Bichon, which I have run for a while and love it. I keep a few months of email locally, and the rest is on my server backup. It’s straightforward to setup and use, fast searches, easy automations, etc.

As others have said, radicale is excellent for hosting calendar and contacts through CalDAV and CardDAV. I’ve used it exclusively for a while and never had an issue. The formats are pretty standard, so you more or less get your choice of client on any system.

I (not EU) self host my email on a vultr VPS. I use the classic dovecot + postfix setup, IMAP for clients, spamd (spamassassin) for extra filtering, etc., etc… I’ve got SPF+DKIM+DMARC, a couple different domains, the whole nine yards, just for hobbying that’s grown over the years for family members.

All that said, unless you’re pretty dang familiar with all those things, I personally would agree with the several people who have just pointed to smaller-time email providers that support custom domain names. It gives you the control to pull it back to your own server later if you want to take on that endeavor (via simply DNS updates), but means you don’t have to worry about the complex bits now. I would definitely not recommend hosting it in your own home - not because of availability issues or anything like that (as others mentioned, legitimate email providers retry by policy, so you don’t need quad-nine uptime), but because most residential IPs, at least by default, are going to get blocked by most providers for being on a common policy blocklist - that is, your ISP likely tells e.g. spamhaus that your IP is residential and shouldn’t be sending email. If you have a business internet plan, that changes. And I could also be wrong for UK; I’ve just got US knowledge on that particular bit.

If you’re familiar with all the bits of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and want to go for it, a VPS would be my recommendation. Note: many block outbound to port 25 by default to prevent spam bots abusing their IPs, so you’ll need to keep that in consideration. Otherwise, one of the email providers mentioned is probably a good bet.

Mail is something I don’t want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well

Edit: I self-host Nextcloud, so contacts & calender are on my private server

What all is down from Microslop?

For Calendar/Contacts I use baikal. I thought about hosting my own email because my host really had me over the coals for what I was doing with it, I started researching and thought it could be fun. I bought a throwaway domain and had one of my static IPs setup for the port 25 being opened up I spent a week trying to do things, most of the Lemmy posts I found and most of the personal things like blogs I was looking for said do not self host your own email.

My previous host was HostHero, they did not have a wildcard email function so I needed to buy the unlimited email package because I do not use the same email address or password for anything. My new host, easyDNS, does offer a wildcard option so I can have unlimitted email addresses.

Why do I use a a different email address for everything? I can just close an account once I no longer use the service or once they start getting spammy, I get next to no spam.

I am not a EU citizen, I am Canadian! So when Trump came in and did his whole 51st state BS I jumped on the boycott Amarica train fast so the Apple services I was paying for stopped, one of which was hide my email so I got Proton, I found out the CEO was a simp for Trump so I was going to host my own and as I said I discovered it is not a simple thing even if I was going to do just one email address.

But I strongly do suggest find a host in the EU, that offers a wildcard option. All though it sounds like you have a good handle on things email is something else.

I’ve self-hosted email for over 20 years but I’m now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I’m the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!

Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.

I’m using Purelymail with my own domain for email hosting. It’s been working very well for me. It supports CalDAV and CardDAV for calendar and contacts. It’s US based though.

I would recommend paying for an email hosting service. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch email providers and keep your email addresses. If you have a static IPv4 address, you can host your own inbound email and just use the hosting service for outbound.

I use Radicale for my calendars and contacts as basically every program, app or device can handle caldav/carddav.

Self-hosting email however is too painful. Not that it isn’t easy on principle… but because the basics are simple all the big mail providers have developed a lot of ways to automatically filter out all those quickly put up mail servers mainly used to distribute spam. So having your own mail server while also constantly jumping through all the hoops so your mails are actually received is barely worth it.