I have been a self-hoster for over a decade with various services like email, Nextcloud and Jellyfin. Many people I meet are interested in a home email server setup but get hung up on the details around domain registration, port forwarding and the hoops you have to jump through with ISPs to receive and send email.
I am imagining a hockey puck sized computer which is your email storage. Your email would stay in your control, never on a cloud system to be harvested. The service aspect would be providing a preconfigured VPN, DNS and email relay.
Would anyone be interested in a truly “plug-n-play” device and service that handles all these details?
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Basically yes, the service is needed to provide ingress and egress u/ElevenNotes has pointed out. I am inspired by a similar project called The Helm which sadly shut down last year. The hardware they were providing was much more powerful. I think they just tried to tackle too much and covid surely didn’t help.