I’ve hosted my own email for 2 years now. Using proxmox mail gateway on a 5€ hetzner VPS. it relays mail to my mail server which I host at home. I’ve dealt with my home public IP changing every now and then with 2 simple scripts. SPF, DKIM, DMARC is all set up.

All in all, it’s relatively low maintenance. PMG makes a good job filtering all the crap and I have yet to receive and actual spam in my inbox (I only had a couple false positives).

I documented the whole setup, can share if you want.

Always fun to do if learning but in production even for personal i would recommend you pay for something like startmail or mailfence and use their custom domain features.

i learned exchange on my own and even had dreams of doing multi tenant exchange until exchange online came and jerked off all over that dream

I set one up for a while and it was a royal PITA! I have since switched to a managed email account using my own domain. So much less trouble. It’s just not worth it in my opinion.

have been running my own mail server(s) since early 2000. If Hillary can, you can :)

but of course there are downsides as well, you need to expose services from the outside, you need to allow SNMP inbound, you need to deal with DNS and various mail security enhancements, deal with anti-spam and do mailware/virus scanning etc. on top of that you would need to consider some kind of “high” availability. if your server goes down = no emails…

for me its worth it, my exchange server have been running for the last 10 years or so, I publish both webmail and use the outlook and/or mail in my phone.

I have multiple domain (10+) and run my own DNS.

The only thing I can’t do is send emails… I have to rely on my ISP for outgoing emails, but that’s a good thing as generally my emails are not marked as spam as they comes from a trusted source.

I have an Exchange vm setup the last 3-4 years now. I use smtp2go for outgoing email. Works really well. I primarily use the system for alerts emails and mailing lists I use. If it breaks its an annoyance but nothing critical. I have a mail filter in front that all incoming mail goes through.

As other said. If you want to see if you can. Yes fun go for it.

Don’t use it for anything important. And know that your ISP will very likely have that port blocked already. And if you call them to ask them to unblock it they are unlikely to be willing to.

This is to prevent scammers and spammers.

Also. Know that even if you were able to. Getting other mail servers to not instantly junk your mail is actually quite difficult or impossible. So your emails would always land in spam, be outright blocked, or be in junk.

I have my own mail server for using some of the service that requires mailing to my own domain.

It needs a static ip for best, which I have. But I’m currently lacking Ptr( if I named right, just a dns thing to do reverse checking) due to I’m not using business line and my isp doesn’t provide the service for home users.

Having one is great, but don’t use it as your main email service.