[internalfx]

I have run a Zimbra server for several years now, it's a full size enterprise grade email server.

I can run it on a $10 droplet from Digital Ocean. $10 is kinda high just for my email, but the bonus is I host _all_ my family's mail. Wife, kids even mom and dad!

It's been nice not being concerned about email privacy. Zimbra is a great piece of software. I think more people should look into it.

[Cthulhu_]

I don't trust myself enough to run my own mail server; did you set up your own backups? What's the uptime / SLA (not that gmail has any but still)? Do you need to set up and manage security yourself?

[y4mi]

i'm not the parent poster, but did host my mail own for a while.

99.99+ uptime for mail is generally not as important, as undelivered emails get resend if it wasn't up at the time of delivery.

it might still be a problem, because its technically possible to disable that feature, but its generally done everywhere.

the bigger problem is, iirc, that the biggest mail provider (gmail) pushes unknown mail servers to spam... so you'll probably be forced to use a relay.

thats still not a big problem, because you generally get one from you domain registrar

there are also fully functional mail implementations that you can use right away with minimal configuration such as MailInABox [0]

...still, i've switched to fastmail ~2 yrs ago and won't be going back to self hosted anytime soon, though i do own several servers i could use for that...

[0] https://mailinabox.email/

[internalfx]

DO makes backups easy.

It Rarely ever goes down (maybe twice in 4 years? I have to think really hard to remember an outage, it's just kinda always....there.)

I periodically run:

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt full-upgrade

Honestly it takes very little of my time, and Zimbra is a really awesome email system.

[blacksmith_tb]

I am not running a mail server on DO, but I do have several other services on their VMs, and they will do automated backups for you for a few USD per month.

[leandrod]

Zimbra means MySQL. Run for the hills — or migrate to Archiveopteryx or something.

[Spastche]

I hope you're checking to see if your IPs are blacklisted or not.