[jedberg]

If you are self-hosting because you care about privacy, I'm not sure why. Email requires two parties. Unless both parties are self hosting, some company has a copy of that email. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon probably see 99% of all email on the internet (ok maybe not that much but probably pretty close).

I'm not sure what privacy you gain by self hosting these days, since no one else is.

[comrade1234]

My wife and I are both in our own self-hosted server. We send sensitive emails back and forth all the time. Well, she does, not me so much. Since we're on the same server it never passes through a third party.

Plus there's people in Europe talking to each other that don't want the USA to read their emails. I mean there tons of situations wheee emails don't go through Google or Microsoft.

[jedberg]

From this[0] report from proton mail, 74% of European email is routed through USA servers. So even if you care, the person you are sending to or receiving from probably does not. So the US companies are still seeing it.

For the use case of you and your wife, you don't really need to self host a mail server, you just need a file server, unless you're forwarding each other emails you got externally, in which case, someone probably already read it.

My overall point is that email requires at least two parties to have access to the content, oftentimes more than two, and chances are one of those parties is not privacy conscious, which breaks any privacy you think you might have.

[0] https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch

[comrade1234]

Proton marketing. They're saying 75% of European companies are hosted in u.s. servers. Please buy our encryption product.

So if they self-hosted more they would t go through the USA.

And I bet now that 75% is decreasing rapidly.

But really email is not secure. It should be encrypted on the wire server to server but that's not guaranteed.

So just try hosting it yourself. It's not a big deal.

[rlpb]

Email seems like an odd choice for sensitive messaging where you're in the position to manage the technology on both ends. Private XMPP or Matrix with E2EE has better privacy properties.

[chappie7]

You’d be surprised how many corporations send their own emails directly or use one of the smaller providers. I’ve checked the headers, and the majority of my utility bills, purchase receipts, itineraries, medical emails, and so on don’t go through Google or Microsoft, and these are the personal profile–building emails I care about keeping private the most.