[_rend]

I recently found myself in exactly the same position for exactly the same reason, so happy to share my experience. :)

I decided a priori to stick with email, both because I can't imagine email going away anytime soon, and also because sending an email two main benefits: (1) the content is plain text, and should remain easily readable at the destination, and (2) you get automatic "backups" in your own Sent folder.

I also wanted to avoid any free services because there's no guarantee they'll stick around, or in the case of something like Gmail, keep the account around unused. And, although I'm a really happy paying Fastmail customer for many years, a new email address on my account felt a bit _too_ expensive for just this purpose (especially since I'll eventually pay for an actual address for them).

Because I already pay $5/month for a tiny Linode instance for other purposes, I decided to self-host. Because I don't plan on having the account send any emails (the hard part of self-hosting), setup was relatively pain-free with Postfix. It took a bit of configuration and testing, but I now have an email account for my little one hosted on a subdomain which reliably receives email and stores it in plain-text on the server. Because I set things up in the Maildir format, in the future, it should be simple to also run Dovecot to provide an IMAP interface to actually get at the emails, or import them elsewhere.

I ran into a bunch of pain points throughout the learning process here that I can share, but don't have a reason to believe you'll run into them too, so I don't want to overwhelm. More than happy to get into the specifics of any part of the process if you want!

[delboni]

For how long you being doing this? How is the experience so far, do you have a quota of writing or just send emails organically when you feel that you want to?

[_rend]

Only a few weeks, so the experience is still pretty fresh. :) I do like it, though: dead-simple once the setup was in place, and zero ongoing maintenance so far.

My plan is to keep it entirely organic — so far have I've only really sent a few emails around the more meaningful-feeling milestones. (Arriving home, one week, etc.) I think, long-term, I'd prefer to have the amount of content not feel _overwhelming_ when I hand it off; I'm not planning on having this be the primary way to document my kid's life, but as something "extra" to be able to pass off to them.

[Also, being a few weeks in: I'd warn against making any plans for the first few weeks assuming you'll have much brain capacity available to you. I'd say, don't stress yourself out too much if you can avoid it.]