can you host an email server at home: yes nothing is stopping you.

the question you meant to ask: will it send and receive email with providers like gmail, M365 etc.

the answer to that question: no.

The reputation problem with hosting email at home is that most residential IPs are blacklisted.

The way around this is to relay your mail through another server (all SMTP servers support this, it’s often called a “smarthost”). This can either be an SMTP server you setup on a VPS with a clean IP or a commercial SMTP relay like Amazon SES. Cloudflare tunnels are for inbound traffic and can’t help with this.

Delivering email to a home SMTP server doesn’t have any reputation challenges, you just need to expose port 25 on your SMTP server to the internet (or again proxy it somehow).

Yes you can do it but from what I hear without being a big company your chances of not being blacklisted are high. I wouldn’t bother personally.

Thanks all :) much appreciated

I do it. I have a cheap vps that is a smart relay. I use ASSP on the back end VPN to my home.

Long story short- you CAN.

But, you are going to have nothing bug headaches, issues, and unreceived/undelivered messages… For many reasons.

Most email providers will outright block residential IP ranges.