So I've been self hosting my mail using the magic of MIAB(https://mailinabox.email/) for quite some time now. I do like it, it's very easy to use and has caused me very few issues.
Setup was very simple, I just ran curl -s https://mailinabox.email/setup.sh | sudo bash then followed the instructions, then using the web portal I setup my account and in under an hour I was good to go.
I have run into issues where I've been going into people's spam, but that seems to slowly be getting better. I occasionally have to tell people to look in their spam as well for emails, but I'm sure that mail servers on the other end have started to put a better reputation on my sending IPs and mark them as good.
I really do like that MIAB supports IPv6(YES MY MAIL SERVER DOES INCOMING AND OUTGOING VIA IPv6!!!!) and that was very easy to configure too, just point the DNS records and it takes care of the rest. I do occasionally check headers to see what protocol was used, and usually it's been IPv4 sadly, I hope that more and more traffic goes via IPv6 in the near future(I'm rooting for IPv6 on everything).
I did setup remote backup to a rsync.net. I had some issues setting it up, but was caused by me being dumb, and some issues that MIAB has, but it was handled. I should probably create an issue so they can fix it, but don't have logs for it anymore and don't want to recreate the issue anytime soon. By default it backs up to the same box that you are using so if you are running on no RAID some RAID where you don't have parity drives you might lose all your emails, so make sure you are syncing your backups elsewhere.
I did have to learn a bit about the proper DNS records needed for mail servers, but those weren't that hard to make, and MIAB gives you a zonefile for the almost all the records that you just have to add in.
Overall, I think self hosting your mail server is a fun experiment. I 100% don't think it's worth doing for anything professional grade, so all business mail is hosted elsewhere(I picked Microsoft 365 since that's kinda the one most others use), but for personal mail where I can experiment around with, it's a great way for me to learn new skills.
I like living on the edge and doing all my mail including professional on MIAB :) Glad to see I could convince you into running it
I don't want to risk professional emails going to spam, though I guess with enough time the reputation can be considered good enough. I guess we just have different risk tolerances haha.
Yeah, in the first few months I had to have a conversation with Microsoft to get my emails un-shitlisted. After the first couple of months I've had no real issues.
How are your backups? I'm a bit surprised that it adds 3 megs worth of backups daily since most of the email I get are worthless and I usually get less than 20/day.
About the same...
Assume that the giant spikes are when you send in attachments?
I was emailing a few files back and forth and noticed at the end of the day the backup was pretty large. Good to know that I'll have access to the attachments in the future though. I'm really curious as to the disk usage of large enterprise mail servers now and how they handle backups(though I assume that most everyone just uses Exchange and that probably has it built in).
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Interesting little update:
Backup size going up quite a bit as I'm using email a lot more especially to send PDFs back and forth a lot.