drnick1 4 hours ago

The common folklore is just FUD. The main issue is deliverability to the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. You need a clean fixed IP in non-residential block and a sufficiently aged domain or your mail will be flagged as spam or rejected. Alternatively, you can use a relay service for outbound email. Besides the deliverability issue, hosting email is fairly trivial from a technical standpoint; on Linux, the standard utilities are Postfix, Dovecot and OpenDKIM. The server is for my own use, so I don't even bother with spam and AV filters.

Even if you can't send email at all (unlikely if you use an outbound relay), there are very significant privacy benefits to having your own server. I send very few emails relative to the number I receive. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to one of big commercial providers.

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  • bigiain 2 hours ago

    > You need a clean fixed IP in non-residential block

    Feels like that's carrying a lot of load there?

    Where do you get those? I doubt any inexpensive VPS provider has any clean IP addresses? AWS charge you $5/month for an elastic IP address, and I bet you'd need to cycle through their pool of those looking for one that hasn't been blacklisted recently?

    There's another thing to consider here too. I was selfhosting my own mail, but back in 2013/14 I investigated all my mail, and even though I'd avoided Google/Microsoft,Yahoo et al. - over 80% of my personal email was on their servers because that's where my correspondents were. I pretty much gave up maintaining my own (slightly over complicated) stuff and gave in and chose to accept the "Do no evil" company at face value. 4 or 5 years later that company no longer existed, even though they continue with the same name today.

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  • crossroadsguy 34 minutes ago

    If I may say so, did you not just show in this very comment that that common folklore about self-hosting email "successfully" is not really FUD? :D

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