[cubesnooper]

> I just don't understand the attraction of self hosting email.

For several years I’ve hosted in the “middle ground” sense described by the OP, running my own incoming mail server and relaying outgoing mail through a big provider.

The main benefit for me (compared to using a big provider with my own domain) is personal privacy. When I used Google for mail, Google had access to so many pieces that make up my personal life: Purchase receipts. Flight itineraries. Conference registrations. Emails from my university. Emails from my realtor. Utility bills. Notifications for subscribed forum threads, GitHub repositories, Wikipedia pages. Whatever newsletters I chose to subscribe to. Theoretical access to any site with password reset by email. Running my own MX eliminates Google’s access to most of these things.

There are other some other benefits too. Free infinite aliases I can use to sign up on any website. No fear of dependence on features that might get paywalled. No sudden danger of having to migrate data to another provider.

> If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for.

Reducing my data footprint is something I care about enough to spend my spare time on.

[dmje]

In my world (running a small digital agency), I've realised that even if I do all the things to reduce my data footprint (for instance, migrate all my docs to NextCloud, self host email, etc), it actually all breaks almost instantly - all it takes is a client to share a doc or folder with me where they use GDocs / Dropbox / whatever, and I'm effectively straight back in it.

My basic strategy is one of slight defeatism, I have to admit. I am 100% in to Google for their (really quite excellent) tools in Google Workspace: nothing is as good as GDocs, nothing is as good as Gmail, nothing is as good as Google Meet; but I do things to ensure I'm not utterly f**d if the Random Google AI Best happens to decide I'm some sort of unspecified menace. So for instance - I use Google Docs but only with .docx / .xlsx files rather than native .gdoc .gsheet files. I back this up automatically to my self-hosted NAS. I do this on a domain which I own, so can step away if things do happen to go south, or costs double or whatever.

Then I use kagi.com for search, and have a piHole / ublock / Brave to minimise footprint from a tracking POV.

I know, it's all probably moot given I just open up my inbox to Google, but I've tried and failed to find a provider that is even close to being the same balance of low price + utility. I got excited about Fastmail but turned out it was a combination of not very good AND really expensive once I factored in having several accounts on the same domain. I had a horrific experience with iCloud+ (they have a weird YEAR long account blocking issue thing that I won't go into now). M$ was awful and required me to send everything through GoDaddy's DNS. All the others were just underwhelming or expensive or both. So - sadly - I'm back in the G stable where I'll stay for the time being... :-)