I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap.

I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap>

It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it.

You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ...

I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirmation the other party actually got it.

Ive self-hosted my email server since 1999. It started in a closet at home in San Francisco. As things got more restrictive (residential ips being black holes) I moved to a Colo. but now I'm back to hosting it on my server in my cellar. I have a fixed ip from my provider init7 (Switzerland) that has never been blacklisted. Reverse dns is set up. All the acronyms like spf, dkim, dmarc are set up. I have no problems sending to Microsoft and Google email addresses.

So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.

What hosting / VPS companies do you recommend? Finding one which allows you to run a mail server is some work.

I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm

> But there are other solutions out there like: Stalwart; Mailcow ;Or if you're a purist you can set up your whole server yourself

Another good guide that uses Debian and its standard packages:

* https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie

(Updated with every release, and upgrade/migration instructions.)

Waiting for a submission of "You should run your own NNTP server" (lots of 'nostalgia' for web forums to come back, so why not this too?).

Sorry the title should have been "You should self-host your mail server" but it seems HN removes the "You should" in the beginning of a title.

I wanted to start this discussion because I think we are prime for more self hosted mail servers in 2026 and in the post I explain how to use a locally hosted LLM to nudge the spam detector rspamd to whether or not an incoming mail is spam.

Also in times where the EU can order your mail providers to scan for unwanted content [1] (currently limited to CSAM, later probably more) it does feel better to have your data at your hand.

[1] https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the...

Counterpoint: No.

Good luck having your emails hitting any inbox instead of ending up in spam.

I've tried self-hosting my mail server, but that means all my outgoing mail will go to Spam on all providers that use reputation-based filtering. In all cases I had SPF, DKIM and DMARC working perfectly, PTR records, etc. but it just doesn't matter. Even a Fastmail domain goes right to spam on my personal account, and they are very very established. It's just not worth it.

I disagree with the author. If you have your own domain for e-mail, then you've already dealt with all risks and vulnerabilities. Of course you have your e-mail stored locally as well by using an e-mail client, which you would anyway.