I just decommissioned the mail server I was running, because I didn't have the capacity with the rest of life to keep on top of it. Mailu was my choice of suite, and it was really great once I figured out how to get it behaving nicely behind my reverse proxy. For the most part it was low maintenance, but I would occasionally have issues with cert renewal and subsequently my email clients would stop connecting. I didn't have issues with non-delivery once I set up the various DNS records and did a lot of test emails that I could mark as not junk to various providers. I ended up switching to using icloud+, which includes email with a custom domain. Would I host my own email again? Possibly if I really need more than 6 addresses. But icloud+ costs less per month than the power consumption of the tiny server I was running mailu on over 3 days. Which is... Not insignificant in the current financial climate.
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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.
I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.
I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)
Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.
I'm using openbsd with dovcot, opensmtpd on a pi. I used mailhardener to get it scoring well. I've had no issues with it getting flagged.
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.
The more I learn about FOSS the more I understand it is just not about using open auditable software, but about having complete ownership of the technology a person uses. I need to learn these things.
Did you ever manage to get off hotmail/outlook spam filters? I ran my own server for years and had no issues with gmail, but was never able to reliably send to hotmail. That was the nail in the coffin in the end as so many businesses I communicate with were on outlook and my mail would always goto spam causing endless issues.
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.
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
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.