Finding a hosting provider that gives you a clean class C to run out of is almost impossible. Every VPS has tenants who spam, and every provider will be flagged in one way or another. You will spend a bunch of time trying to white-list/make your mail server behave to ensure delivery to the google/microsoft mail servers, and some systems will just ban your email anyways.

It got to the point where I would send an email to someone, and then follow up with a phone call because I was not confident mail would be delivered as expected.

I found a hosting provider dedicated to e-mail (Migadu actually), and switched everything over to that and haven't realistically had to worry about maintaining a mail server since

Currently using Mox with eth-services.de (they have clean IPs and help with rDNS.

Perfect deliverability to Google, Outlook, etc. you need to make sure DMARC and SPF are working, do not use IPv6, reverse DNS, good IP reputation, and a domain that's been registered for a long enough time.

A month ago I upgraded to Ubuntu 26.04. Usually these upgrades go smooth, but not this time. The upgrade broke my Postfix/Dovecot/Amvisd/Spamassassin/Clamav stack. Over time the stack became too complex, and I could not figure it out anymore. Instead I did a crash migration to Stalwart. Stalwart is challenging to setup when it does not control the full http stack, but for sure it was easier than fixing Dovecot.

Mine runs on an Intel NUC at home, with the a sensible ISP who naturally can provide a fixed IP address (everything open), IPv6, and clean address.

Been very happy with it, both the software, and the independence :) A little IT and network knowledge is useful if you're doing more than the standard (VPS) install, but that's to be expected.

Due to a forced IP change by ISP I recently changed to having outgoing mail sent by AWS SES, using it to do the DKIM signing, so my mailserver postfix uses it as the sender, but the receiving happens on my stuff.

I think its a nice balance between self hosting and managing deliverability, but agree it doesn't count as 100% self hosted.

It runs on a hp cube server in my house, backed up frequently with restic.

https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest...

However, my server went down many, many times for hours without me noticing, sometimes for days.

Despite today's outage, it's still more than worth having a third-party company like Google or Microsoft handle your email. At least they have monitoring 24/7 and people on call to fix issues when things stop working.

Inbound self hosting still has its advantages. I control filtering, storage and backups, and data sovereignty is mine. Spam is always a pain, but blocking spammy providers entirely keeps spam volumes low (maybe 1-5 a day that aren't rejected at SMTP time) and I don't seem to miss anything important, not even one-off transactional emails with random businesses.

I'm also considering self-hosting email, but pretty much everything I've read suggests that keeping your emails out of spam folders is a huge pain. Still exploring different options.

I have been hosting my mail server for more than 20 years. Fedora + sendmail + dovecot. I had the biggest problems with Microsoft servers. They blocked my (not spam) e-mails repeateadly and I gave up writing to support. :( But, I intend to keep doing it. I think is worth it.

But if half the world is using Outlook.com for their email you still can't reach anyone if Azure goes down.

Some emails end up in spam some don't, quite frankly I just need it for system alerts for my self hosted services

Works like a charm!

[0]: https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

The basics are easy to get done, just install mailcow via docker. The hard bits usually involve setting DNS up correctly and ensuring your mailserver fulfils all requirements to not be seen as spam. There are online checking tools for that, you send a mail there and it gives you a score and recommendations what needs to be improved.

But even this is not hard. I installed my mailserver on a weekend and transferring existing accounts took the majority of times.

Maintenance since then is the usual Linux webserver update maintenance and a simple docker update once the version comes out. Maybe 15 minutes a month.

self hosting was a breeze. one day to setup exim, nginx+letsencrypt to rotate certs, dmarc and sfp and everything passing with flying colors.

only nightmare is having it open to the outside, but wireguard solves that.

and i get less spam marks everywhere. it's a finally the time to self host email!

Self hosting for 25+ years, hundreds of domains. Postfix, dovecot, spam-assassin, OpenDKIM. Everything works, last 20 years with little to no maintenance. The biggest hurdle is fraud-like "antispam" companies ProofPoint and alike.

Tech stack doesn't matter at all - what matters is your knowledge to set it up. You can get exactly same results with MS Exchange or exim.

This brings to an important topic - if you don't know how to set it up properly - don't do it. Proper mail delivery (if we speak volumes in 8+ numbers daily) is not a "do this 5 min set up and forget" by some ai slop writer, but something requiring tuneup from someone who has experience on how real world mail works. Arguably it is exactly why 99% people who try to selfhost email fail.