I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)

I run my own email server using Mailcow. It works well.

However, I do not even attempt to directly send outbound email. It's very difficult to get your server trusted by the major providers, especially Microsoft (who are very picky about email servers). I have an account with MXRoute (which is an email provider) but only use it for outbound relaying. Inbound emails go directly to my server.

For what it's worth, MXRoute is a great provider to consider if you want to move away from the large ones (Google, Microsoft, etc) but don't want to self-host.

“No. No, man. Hell no. No, i imagine someone would get their ass kicker if they said something like that”

I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.

Very interesting. Thanks for the follow up.

@DidacticDumbass@lemmy.one I do, it is a pain and I understand why it is not worth for some people.

I used to. I had a docker-mailserver. It was good. But I moved house and changed ISP. I couldn't set up the reverse DNS on my address, and Gmail was blocking me, so I had to switch to a hosted mail server (namecheap private email).

It's a shame, syncing is noticably slower, and I only get one mailbox, but oh well. Just keep on using GPG.

I host my own mailserver, and to be honest it's pretty painless. Usually I just let it run without giving it any thought. It's on rare occasions that I need to put a bit of work into improving the inbound spam scanning.

Selfhosting does need quite some knowledge of the software stack and several additional protocols to set them up correctly to get your outgoing email delivered. Also, like already mentioned in another comment, you absolutely need an IP address from a non-blacklisted subnet (I think most VPS providers will be okay, residential definitely not).

My software stack: Arch Linux (soon NixOS), Postfix, Dovecot, rspamd, opendkim, opendmarc.

Additional techniques configured: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC.

As you can see it's quite a lot, and I've been doing for more than 20 years now, so my opinion can be a bit skewed. I'd say go for it if selfhosting is a hobby.

I want to do a setup where i use mailcow at home for receiving emails but Amazon ses SMTP for sending, it's possible? Looks like it is, but i didn't investigate it

I just decommissioned the mail server I was running, because I didn't have the capacity with the rest of life to keep on top of it. Mailu was my choice of suite, and it was really great once I figured out how to get it behaving nicely behind my reverse proxy. For the most part it was low maintenance, but I would occasionally have issues with cert renewal and subsequently my email clients would stop connecting. I didn't have issues with non-delivery once I set up the various DNS records and did a lot of test emails that I could mark as not junk to various providers. I ended up switching to using icloud+, which includes email with a custom domain. Would I host my own email again? Possibly if I really need more than 6 addresses. But icloud+ costs less per month than the power consumption of the tiny server I was running mailu on over 3 days. Which is... Not insignificant in the current financial climate.

I feel like I'll eventually have to... mailbox.org upped their prices from 1 EUR/mo to... whatever they are right now, and on top of that I'll still need a VPN to access heinous sites such as pastebin (welcome to Turkey), which is another 5 EUR/mo.

For that money I could get an alright enough VPS from Hetzner and spend some time getting everything configured properly, and have bonus flexibility in terms of hosting anything else I might want to host.

The problem with this ofc is that no "turnkey" mail bundle seems to give a shit about resource usage as far as I'm aware, and I'm worried they'll end up hogging all the server resources for themselves.