I’m contemplating taking control of my email by moving away from mainstream providers like Gmail or Outlook. What self-hosted email services have you tried, and which ones do you find most reliable and user-friendly? Are there any challenges or advantages you’ve encountered in making the switch?
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”).
Just need to check it first (port 25) and use providers with good reputation. Many years I got many VPS-based mailservers without any problems with IP block or similar problems. Just need to make initial setup of you server correctly. Reputation services are not banning big ranges of IP addresses because of one stupid-spam server in providers network. But if you can’t deny free relay on your host, it’s just your problem and no problem of your provider.