I like sendgrid. They have a free smtp service that works great.

$10/year gets you what you need from Purelymail. https://purelymail.com I have used them for the last year or so and the service is fast and near real time with messages hitting my inbox (I use Thunderbird to download my mail).

I’m hosting mine on two VPS running OpenBSD :

• opensmtpd
• opendkim
• dovecot
• spamd
• spamassassin
• roundcube (webmail)
• mlmmj (for newsletters)

Setup is rock solid and hasn’t failed me in the last couple years, since I added the secondary server to temporarily queue mails in case the primary goes down. spamd can be a bit inconvenient sometimes (but that’s on purpose) and I have a script to disable it temporarily when I need a quick email.

I have SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup on my DNS too, as well as requires records like A and PTR for my hosts.

As for the cost, I pay 30$/year for the domain, and 10$/month for the 2 servers. Backup is on backblaze and ridiculously cheap for the amount of mails I backup.

Email is the one thing I don’t bother self hosting.

You need to use an existing host with reputation or most of your emails will end up in junk or be outright blocked.

Fastmail.

But, it’s not the cheapest. $5 a month gets what you need though.

Really quick WebUI, great features, including hosting your own domains and smtp rewriting.

Very smart helpful support team.

Great for degoogling.

Can you selfhost? Does you ISP allow you to host a mail server? (and there is a difference between what they say, and what they actually do.)

I use iRedMail as a complete solution which is a mailserver, complete with server management and webclients sogo and icube.

The problem you may run into is if your ISP actively submits its customer email subnets to sites like Spamhaus. But if you dont get IP changes very often this might not be a problem. However you do also need to have a domain in your control and know how to do DKIM and SPF

I host an SMTP relay on a cheap IONOS VM. Had to ask support to open port 25 but that seems standard now. At home I have Mailcow running and configured to use my SMTP relay. Firewall on the IONOS VM prevents all connections except those from my home IP range.

I self host using mailcow. Easy setup. Prevents most of the beginner pitfalls via exemplary documentation.

I self host through my ISP connection.

• sendmail
• bogofilter
• bogofilter-milter
• opendkim
• Cyrus for POP3/IMAP
• roundcube

I have static IP and needed to get a business plan to obtain it. I am actually wondering if there’s place where I can set up a tunnel (that would work with freebsd) and then I could use cheaper, customer based plan.

My problem is to get something that wasn’t abused by spammers. I don’t plan to send any advertising, it would be low volume, since it is just for my and my family.

I was under the impression Proton Bridge was available for any paid subscription. I’ve had a Visionary plan for years, so I can’t say for certain since I get a lot of perks as a result.

The bridge is a bit tetchy, sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t, and can never really say why. You also need to have the bridge app installed on the machine you’re using it on (eg won’t work on mobile or any unsupported platform). The tl;dr for this is if you need to rely on SMTP / IMAP ProtonMail isn’t ideal.

I do actually have Proton Bridge running on my Yunohost machine, the CLI version was annoying to set up but that is the only install I haven’t had too much issue with (yet). The thing to be aware with that Proton is super anal about the email address you’re sending from, if it isn’t an alias (or a hosted domain) on the account it isn’t going to have any of that.

In terms of self-hosting though, I have a Wildduck install running. The software isn’t really production ready, but for a personal home server does the job super well. You can also get it to auto-encrypt incoming emails with PGP (similar to Proton) and it saves emails you send via SMTP to your Sent item folder automatically.

My advice for self-hosting though, is use a SMTP Smarthost from a professional provider (I’ve always used Duocircle and Spamhero), Google and Microsoft make self-hosting a nightmare even if you are fully compliant, but these operators give you a better chance of getting through.

Because I’m lazy, I also use MXGuardDog to filter incoming email, I rack up free credits by placing a link on my website so I’ve never once paid for the service in cold hard cash. But realistically you could skip this part.

Recently signed up with https://www.migadu.com, been great so far

We use Maddy, which is pretty easy to set up.

I use my domain name with iCloud+ mail. I self hosted the domain for almost a decade and it’s just easier paying for hosting. I have done it on both O365 and Gmail but they have both nerfed the ability to use custom domains so iCloud it is.

I currently use Protonmail but for some time I used hMailServer on Windows (https://www.hmailserver.com).

I used to run my own email for years. Started on qmail, postfix+dovecot. Anti-spam (spamassassin for a while, rspamd), spf+dkim+dmarc, srs, arc-signing for forwards. All kinds of other tools, even wrote some of my own. I’ve learned a lot and pretty much ran the gamut to be honest.

So all that said, nowadays I just host with mxroute. Bought a lifetime plan. There’s features it doesn’t have but it’s good enough to get emails and a lot easier than self hosting.

I generally recommend finding a host that has the features you want at a price that seems fair. Email is the kind of thing that needs to just always work.

Once you set it up sure, it’s rock solid. Until one day you realize your emails are getting dropped and there’s some new thing you’ve gotta look into. Let somebody else handle it.