I have a server in my home, on my private internet connection, it runs postfix and dovecot.
It works fine. But beware: Sending mails become a hassle as your ISP might block outgoing mail on port 25, you'll need to convince them to provide you with the details of their relay machine. On my connection, I needed the correct reverse-dns entry to be present for their server to actually relay for me, this proved hard because their support didn't understand that THEY were the ones in control of rdns, they only knew about forward-dns.. It took me some linkedin sniping and a nontrivial amount of social engineering to infiltrate their netops enough to find a guy that I could convince to add the rdns entry. It was very painful.
It was in sharp contrast to when I joined the Internet around the turn of the century, on my ADSL, the ISP had a polite letter apologizing for blocking outgoing port 25 and full indstructions on how to use their relay host, even a few lines on how to configure exim to use it.
A slightly convoluted way of getting out, that I had to resort to during aproblem at my ISP, was the following: http://dusted.dk/pages/aWayOut/ where I basically used a cheap VPS as a "gateway to the Internet" for my server.
Sendmail and POP3/dovecot here, and a small static IP address block and a business service plan that allows server hosting. And yes, rDNS got more fun when I was no longer managing whole class Cs!
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I'm still self-hosting.
I have a server in my home, on my private internet connection, it runs postfix and dovecot.
It works fine. But beware: Sending mails become a hassle as your ISP might block outgoing mail on port 25, you'll need to convince them to provide you with the details of their relay machine. On my connection, I needed the correct reverse-dns entry to be present for their server to actually relay for me, this proved hard because their support didn't understand that THEY were the ones in control of rdns, they only knew about forward-dns.. It took me some linkedin sniping and a nontrivial amount of social engineering to infiltrate their netops enough to find a guy that I could convince to add the rdns entry. It was very painful.
It was in sharp contrast to when I joined the Internet around the turn of the century, on my ADSL, the ISP had a polite letter apologizing for blocking outgoing port 25 and full indstructions on how to use their relay host, even a few lines on how to configure exim to use it.
A slightly convoluted way of getting out, that I had to resort to during aproblem at my ISP, was the following: http://dusted.dk/pages/aWayOut/ where I basically used a cheap VPS as a "gateway to the Internet" for my server.
Sendmail and POP3/dovecot here, and a small static IP address block and a business service plan that allows server hosting. And yes, rDNS got more fun when I was no longer managing whole class Cs!
Really funny story, it's hilarious that your ISP had a polite letter about this whole deal centuries ago. Where did ISP's go wrong?
Somewhere between viruses/botnets abusing SMTP and discovering they could charge 10x more for a "business" plan
There's also Mail-in-a-Box: https://mailinabox.email/