https://mailbox.org/ and https://tuta.com/ are pretty neat providers.

After hosting my own email in the 1990s-2010s, I’ve been cured of that and rather give some dedicated vendor a few bucks a year to take care of all the headaches for me.

Proton mail

Trust me you do not want to point an MX record at your houses IP. It’s a terrible idea, dont do it, I don’t have the energy to qualify that statement but just trust me, don’t.

I wouldnt selfhost my e-mail. You will quickly be blacklisted since your server wont have a good reputation and will have issues sending out emails to peers.

iCloud mail is working great for me and it’s totally free. Apple does the hosting, you’ll need to own your own domain, and you can use one email address with it (not sure if here is a way around that).

Modoboa + Thunderbird

Fastmail, all the way

Exchange

Mail in a box or poste.io

Disagree with 99% of the other posts. If you self-host your email it is archived on your system. So-called “private” email isn’t after 6 months in the US. And it is more stable and higher performance to run my own Roundcube webmail on my own server. And I can control the spam filtering. All reasons to host your own.

However there is some “maintenance” involved with unscrupulous black list sites and overzealous email filter software. Google likes to declare basically everything not coming from their buddies as spam Microsoft wants you to kiss the ring. On a work account just this week I tried contacting a German company called Beckhoff and after just 3 “dead” email accounts from previous contacts they decided to ban my entire company (about 100 employees, been in business over 75 years). They also don’t answer their phones. Not sure if they’re still in business or just being German jerks. As a result of their poor performance we may switch to a competitor. I do not put up with that crap.

Also I’m not sure how to phrase this politely but despite promises unless you are using PGP to end-to-end encrypt your email, and even then it’s not 100%, you can’t ever totally make it private. Also it is impossible to totally ensure identity of the sender although we’ve come a long way. Protonmail recently published how they delivered a criminal to the authorities using the small amount of public information they log.

As a result I do agree that you should let someone else deal with the black listers, bans, etc. But I strongly disagree with keeping it on a remote server more than about 10 minutes. That means one of three options (for receiving:

1. If you have a static ipv4 IP use the email service on Cloudflare to act as a mail relay and forward email to your server. Thus Cloudflare’s reputation not yours is what matters.
2. If you don’t have a static address, you can rent a VPS. Low end box (lowendbox.com) has some great coupons all the time. You can get easily under $12/year. In this case tunnel from your actual server to the VPS. We really don’t “need” the VPS.
3. Pay for a forwarding server. I used Dynu in the past. Never had an issue. It was I think $10/year. Again this assumes you have an accessible server on a static or dynamic ip. And you are basically paying for what Cloudflare does for free.
4. Pay for webmail. Again Dynu is $20. Then just program your local webmail to call imap and download everything say every 5 minutes. But it limits you to ONE user or each user doing their own thing.

On server dovecot and sendmail work well. Roundcube looks exactly like an improved gmail.

For sending I use smtp2go. At my low usage entire family is free.

Zextras Carbonio [ https://zextras.com/carbonio ] self hosted all the way.

Mailcow is pretty straightforward to setup and has good documentation. No matter what you choose though be prepared to put a decent amount of work into it. I also recommend using an SMTP relay like SendGrid or Mailgun. That way you don’t have to worry about deliverability as much. If you’re not planning on sending a lot of email (<100 emails a day for SendGrid) you can use their free tiers.

self hosted mailserver here (on an old, dedicated vps)… just dovecot/postfix/mysql and the usual (amavis & spamassasin) - if i need to add/edit/delete users or domains, that’s just a bash script.

there’s lots of other options already mentioned, but you could also consider aws for this: you set your domain up with them (or verify it), set SES to forward inbound mails to wherever you want, and set your mailclient to send out through ses.

antispam & dkim/dmarc/spf included.

Self hosting with mailcow.

Alternatively proton.me

Might not be the answer you are looking for: I would strongly advise against self-hosting your main email, especially if you are thinking about doing it on an IP address from a residential ISP or VPS/cloud provider. Unfortunately those kind of addresses have bad reputations for spam, and you will run in to significant deliverability issues at minimum. Some providers flat out block port 25, which makes sending and receiving unauthenticated email impossible (which is required to operate an “email provider”).