alt Hacker NewsI’ve been self hosting E-mail (send and receive) with SSL and IMAP, for my family and a few hobby clubs on a $5 Linode VPS for at least a decade, probably more. Very few problems over that time period. Basic exim4/dovecot setup. Occasionally some crappy ISP’s spam filter gets too aggressive but I follow their unblocking procedure and am fine from there. I do keep my old empty gmail account around in case that changes but I don’t use it much.
The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.
I used to do the same for many years woth dovecot as well. Its not too difficult plus now with the llms it can probably be easier to maintain the configuration fires (I havent tried).
However I did have issues with the VPS provider I was using getting blocked and not just my VPS’ IP but the entire block. So at some point it became tok tedious to have to follow the unblock process.
And so I switched to fastmail and have been using it for over two years. No major complaints.
Would I self-host again? If I have the free time I think its fun and you can learn a lot. However, if you have young kids and are too busy with life I would say go with a provider you trust with your data.