[mmh0000]

Fastmail is like $150 for 3 years.

That's cheaper than I can rent any mail-capable VPS for, and it's cheaper than the electricity I'd pay (80W @ $0.15/kWh = $316 over 3 years) to self-host.

And that doesn't include my personal-time hourly cost.

[ssl-3]

I'm not saying that a person should undertake hosting their own email here in 2026, but: 80 Watts sounds like a lot for a personal mail server.

The last small-corpo email server I ran myself was a Pentium 4 box that worked for eons. It did all of the things (the spam filtering, the virus scanning, the tossing, the software RAID storage, the open internet-facing ports including the webmail) for all of the people.

But it turned out that even with dozens of users, it hardly ever saw any load. Email was a complete snoozefest for it.

I'm quite confident that an N100 box would run circles around that P4 machine using any metric, and use an average of less than 10 Watts if all it needs to do is serve mail at home.

[paddim8]

$150 for 3 years for just email is not cheap in my opinion. Also, it says closer to $200 for me but maybe it's regional. Fastmail is not a cheap provider. iCloud, Purelymail, Migadu, etc. are cheap.

You can certainly rent a mail-capable VPS less. Especially if you send emails through the AWS mail service. A small home server capable of hosting mail will absolutely not use 80W. It will use <10w.

[tinnet]

I find the price jump at 5gb for Migadu pretty steep. I’m carrying around 2 decades of emails so I’d need the next size up for sure and that brings it in Fastmail territory without providing all the bells ans whistles Fastmail has. (E.g. 1Password masked mail integration, iOS push)