Infomaniak has pretty nice free email server options that you can link your domain to. They are a Switzerland based company which is known for having the best privacy laws around.

there are many replies saying similar things, but don't be discouraged from try it out. i host my own with mailinabox on a vm from a cloud provider. no spam issues. the only wildcard was spending a few months getting my ip address off google's spam filters. it is so worth it, i own my own email/calendar/contacts/notes/todo list/ AND website solution. all with mailinabox. completely disconnected from google etc.

I run a complete ISP style setup with multiple domains. I run it from a rented server at Hetzner, so i don't have problems with being black listed for sending from a consumer IP.

I've thought about rolling my own email service, but I'm hesitant given the risk of it inadvertently nuking the rest of my network. There's a lot of work needed to keep the thing secure, and even if you do everything right there's a good chance you get SMTP traffic blocked because other services are worried about unknown accidentally hosting spammer networks.

Plus given my prior track record, there is a $1000% chance I screw up the DNS entries for any mail servers I set up.

I do. Run about a half dozen email servers for various organizations. Been doing it for almost a decade for some. Other than initial setup pain, I've had zero problems others describe. I have used (and still run) docker-mailserver, mailcow, mail-in-a-box and mailu. All are lovely in their own way and fit various use cases better than others.

Gotta say, I’m really happy to see so many people here actually talking about doing it! Usually I see a lot of fear-mongering about self hosting email. You can do it, though, and I think we should encourage more people to do so! It can be a little tricky to set up at first because there’s a lot of different things you need to configure and make talk to each other — I haven’t used them but there’s things like mail-in-a-box that are supposed to make this easier. But the most important thing is to make sure you set up SPF, DMARC, and DKIM DNS records (and set up DKIM signing for your outgoing messages). I’d recommend setting the ruf and rua tags in the DMARC record so you get mailed reports from other mail servers (can help you debug if your mail is getting rejected). I’d also use these tools:

https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.learndmarc.com/

Happy mailing :)

I ran email server with Mailcow Docker. Easiest way I have found. It is perfect to host your own mailbox but as other have said, the sending from your IP might just get blocked by other big mail servers. Luckily Mailcow allows you to use it as a SMTP relay and you can route outbound mail through the well known SMTP services.