Just a mailbox at IONOS for 1x Busimess plan and 25 free (2gb) mailbox.
Costs me 7€ per month. And so far almost zero downtime.

Agree with most folks here, mail is too hard to self host because of the control larger providers hold around acceptance rules. I use zoho for my email, been pretty solid so far though I’m sure there are others. I use nextcloud for contacts, tried using nextcloud for calendar but had trouble getting it to send invites to people so I just use zoho for calendar as well now.

Off site fallback I sync email, calendar and contacts to multiple machines but I also use back blaze as an off site cloud backup. One day I’ll get around to syncing the emails to my home server and also backing those up to backblaze.

This is all for personal use though, if I was doing anything enterprise or mission critical I’d just pay another provider to do it who isn’t a vibe coded nonsense factory.

I’m going back to my KISS mindset.

I got the Mozilla ThunderMail invite and using ThinderBird for the client. It’s all basic, direct and just works.

I own a business. We hit 9 years in September. When we started we did O365. At that time, a business as small as us had to go with a Microsoft “partner” because MS wasn’t going to deal with a business as small as us. We were immediately “man in the middle” hacked. We’d been in business 3 months and someone was grabbing our incoming emails and replying as if they were us. We had no idea. They changed payment terms and re-routed our checks as direct payments to some digital accounts in Miami (USA). I have no doubt that it was our Microsoft “partner” that set us up with O365 and Lync (this was a long time ago). When we pressed Microsoft about it they became totally unresponsive or nasty. We lost about $25,000 dollars right at the very beginning of our business. It was a very dark time for me. But, honestly, that was the best $25K I ever spent. Talk about “attack Surface”.!!! Now I do Fastmail, Nextcloud a nd other self hosted services. I am absolutely convinced that losing $25k was an absurd bargain. People on O365/ SharePoint/Teams get hacked every fucking day. But they don’t tell you about it.

I self-host it with https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver.

• I had to set it up with all these SPF and DKIM and DMARC stuff. Wasn’t too hard, just follow the guide. Test with GMail - the message details view says exactly what you have, what you haven’t, and what’s wrong.
• Every now and then I have to jump through some hoops to get my IP allowlisted in some weird provider or antispam system.

Email is a very old protocol, it originates from the time when computers were connected only occasionally. It is very much possible to come an agreement to power up the antennas at something o’clock every day to exchange emails, and the rest of the time they just sit in the queue.

Practically speaking, if your home lab is down for something like 12h, it should not impact email delivery much at all - the sending servers would just keep retrying. Usually for 48h. From https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1

mail that cannot be transmitted immediately MUST be queued and periodically retried by the sender.

The sender MUST delay retrying a particular destination after one attempt has failed.

Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days.

Microsoft documents this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/mail-flow-about#mail-flow-delivery-faq

Deferred messages remain in our queues for one day.

I guess technically they’re RFC-compliant, but 1 day is not as much as I’d like…

Mailo.com is a privacy friendly email provider in France. As far as I know they do only email.

Recently they upped the prices a bit, my account is from before that, and payed 60 euro for five years.

1. Get cheap Hetzner VPS with redundant volume.
2. Get a domain name.
3. Run Stalwart for you mail server.
4. Run Bulwark for your inbox web app.
5. Run Kanidm for an identity provider.
6. Configure these DNS records: MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC

There are more details, but those are the basics.

Mail is a piece of software I won’t bother self-hosting. I already tried, put in it a lot of time, trying to get my IP address considered safe because it was banned 15 years before I had it, to only have a third of my mail sent successfully received. It is not worth the effort and I switched to proton and recently to infomaniak.

I’m hosting my own, on a dedicated Hetzner server (used for a bunch of stuff, “dedicated” as in “only me on the hardware”), using nixos-mailserver.

I’ve a 10/10 score on all the spam tests / deliverability tests I could find. The only deliverability issue I’ve ever had is t-online, but only because they require you to apply for being allowlisted, lmao. (Was one quick email to do that though, so… fine.)

It’s been a couple of years of smooth sailing now, so I’m not super worried anymore; esp. in the beginning though, it was a bit anxiety-inducing (and I did cause some downtime by fucking up my bootloader and needing a KVM from Hetzner at one point, that was a very sweaty evening not least because the email address I had put for contact info was, well, handled by the server that was down. Btw Hetzner email you the link to your KVM. Fun times!).

Anyways: I’m really happy with my setup now, in all aspects. Calendar and contacts self-hosting is also great.

But, just so you know: you will not be able to do this on your residential IP. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, it will not work. You’ll be able to receive emails no problem, but if you’re lucky you’ll end up in people’s spam folder. More likely, the recipient server will just outright reject or discard your mail.

Hosting in Aus, dovecot + postfix. It’s been solid.

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 run mailcow on a vps on a smaller, reputable, European host. I started out with Hetzner but there I had problems with delivery due to a bad neighbourhood. It really helps with a host that cares and take abuse seriously.

After moving it’s mostly been good. I don’t have any issues with outgoing mail, all seems to land fine on both gmail/outlook etc. It’s pretty low effort, just need to stay on top of upgrades since there are internet exposed services.

Here is also a good post about best practice for smaller servers: https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2020/07/small-mailserver-bcp/

I have a filter that encrypts all incoming mail with my pgp public key, for added security (this is not bullet proof as it has to sit after rspamd but should make it harder to read any mails in case of any kinds of breaches).

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.

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