I see people saying self-hosting email is difficult - I disagree. If you know what a DNS record is, how to SSH into a server, and how to run a docker container, then self-hosting email will be easy for you. Postfix and Mailcow make it quite simple these days.
The problem with self-hosting is that even after setting up everything correctly, you will still likely run into delivery issues with your outgoing mail because your IP doesn't have the right reputation, i.e. it's not associated with a globocorp. What will follow is a cat and mouse game of contacting the various big email providers and asking/begging/demanding them to whitelist your IP so that they don't send your mail directly to spam. The responses to these whitelist requests vary between being ignored and being temporarily whitelisted.
Many consider this to be a losing game and give up self-hosting email.
But you might want to just sign up for a cheap email provider like Fastmail. If you self-host, you'll likely spend at least $5/mo for the VPS anyway, and if you have 100 or fewer custom domains, Fastmail is just under $5/mo, so I'd say that's a better deal than self-hosting.
Comments
I see people saying self-hosting email is difficult - I disagree. If you know what a DNS record is, how to SSH into a server, and how to run a docker container, then self-hosting email will be easy for you. Postfix and Mailcow make it quite simple these days.
The problem with self-hosting is that even after setting up everything correctly, you will still likely run into delivery issues with your outgoing mail because your IP doesn't have the right reputation, i.e. it's not associated with a globocorp. What will follow is a cat and mouse game of contacting the various big email providers and asking/begging/demanding them to whitelist your IP so that they don't send your mail directly to spam. The responses to these whitelist requests vary between being ignored and being temporarily whitelisted.
Many consider this to be a losing game and give up self-hosting email.
If you can get through to legal departments, you may have better and more permanent success in getting whitelisted, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225619
But you might want to just sign up for a cheap email provider like Fastmail. If you self-host, you'll likely spend at least $5/mo for the VPS anyway, and if you have 100 or fewer custom domains, Fastmail is just under $5/mo, so I'd say that's a better deal than self-hosting.