Would agree.

Even when done 100% by the book and correct. Companies like Google and Microsoft, in particular, will just randomly send the email to spam.

I gave up after years of fighting the good fight and went to googles free tier. That is now over and I probably just need to move to some other service.

Also dont use a gTLD or if you do, have a backup .com or .us as well. Many forms dont recognize things like .email as legit.

Even if you set up everything perfectly you encounter email providers that only have allow lists and you have to jump through hoops to be allowed to send emails to them (like publishing your whole name and address). I loved the fact that I had a mail server but in the end it didn’t make sense.

Additionally, these days the sheer amount of flak that a self-hosted mail server gets are enough to make a lot of providers ask you to either shut it down or go somewhere else. Probably 80-90% of the server’s inbound network traffic will be bots trying to brute force access (usually over POP3 or IMAP4, though occasionally SSH) to use it as a spam relay as well as relatively dumb bots just assuming that your server is an open relay and trying to send garbage through it. That kind of traffic hogs a lot of bandwidth and the hosting provider will have to do something about it to keep their infrastructure stable. Also, figure that you’ll be spending about as much CPU time on the server for anti-spam processing on a 24x7 basis.

I have to agree with other commenters, it’s just not worth the hassle and kinetic pattern baldness these days.

To anyone not scared off by this, my main mail server is based around this guide. I make some changes, but I think it does a good job explaining the various moving parts and a way of setting them up:

https://workaround.org/ispmail/bullseye/

There are also some easy to deploy dockerized projects that I hear are good like mailcow.

https://mailcow.email/

Or to for the simplest experience, you could use panel software like cpanel or plesk or something that does e-mail, web hosting, etc all in one package. I manage a plesk install that works… okay.

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Managing e-mail is a bit of a pain, especially the initial setup, and finding clean IP spaces. But honestly I spend very little time managing mine. Months go by where I basically do nothing.

…then microsoft or google do something stupid, or a user gets infected and send some spam I don’t catch, and I’ve got a day of hecticly trying to get mail flowing again while users send me nastygrams

THIS!

Managing mail servers is the worst. If you want your own email just go register email on something like Zoho. It’s cheap and the couple $$ you spend on it is money well spent to prevent the time and aggravation you’ll have running your own server.

Thank you for saving me some wasted time.