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?
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...
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.
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/