[endymi0n]

It sounds less like FUD than a change in perspective.

When I was in my twenties, I would have empathized with your point. I used to host my own web servers, but back then, my main priorities were curiosity, privacy and independence.

Not just that, I opened accounts for friends and family.

A decade later, I made all my hosting someone elses‘ problem, because I had different priorities.

There‘s nothing like the sound of a friend shouting in your ear because he trusted you with his mail address and he‘s running into weird errors. Or trying to get an important email delivered after a 10h crunch shift when you just want to bring your kids to bed instead.

I‘m thankful for all those learnings, but nowadays, I‘m old enough to just want mail to frickin work, that‘s why Google does it for me on a custom domain.

[organsnyder]

As I got further into my thirties, I became much more aware of the concept of opportunity cost: by deciding to do one thing, I'm by definition deciding to not do others. Running my own mail server is one task that has not made the cut for being more worthwhile than other priorities in my life.

[jjav]

Sad to see all the negativism. To anyone considering it, just run your own email infrastructure and don't let the naysayers put you down. Email is far too critical to let any megacorporation own you on it.

I spend approximately no time at all in maintaining my email infrastructure which I set up around ~10 years ago.

Of all the things I self-host and self-manage, my email server and related parts is the one which requires the least attention and ongoing work, by far. Set up postfix, it'll take some work initially, then it'll chug along forever.