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by jjav 1515 days ago
Yes to the OP, you most definitely can host your own email fully.

Many of us do it. If you have any interest in the topic, either due to the fun of managing the servers and learning something along the way or due to the moral high ground of supporting decentralization above proprietary walled gardens, do it!

Ignore the naysayers, if you're interested you can do it.

Will some emails very occasionally end up in the spam folder of a recipient? I mean, yes, but that is true of everything. You can end up in spam folder sending from Microsoft Office mail to gmail or vice versa. Heck, every now and then an email from my manager will end up in my spam folder in gmail even though he's emailing me from gmail to gmail, both of us in the same corporate gsuite account! So on average, once you set everything up correctly, your deliverability will be as good as gmail to gmail, which is to say not 100% perfect but no worse than any other solution. And you'll be in control of your email infrastructure and address. No longer will google/microsoft/apple/yahoo be able to cut you off all your accounts on the whim an AI gone bad.

The parent post mentions a useful safety valve to know about if you're worried about deliverability and want to take baby steps to get there. You can always, either selectively or wholesale, use a commercial relay for outbound mail from your email server. Some have free tiers that are plenty for personal/family use.

Personally I don't use any third party relay, I deliver to everywhere from my own infrastructure. No issues.

1 comments

Me too, and this is my experience as well. In the rare event that I find out that someone isn’t getting my emails, I tell them that they should complain to their provider or use a different one. I’m no longer willing to jump through hoops so that hotmail delivers my email.