I’m tempted to move to email with my own domain, but don’t really care about the server side of things, I guess I’m following the line that self hosted email is not easy to do, and not sure how reliable I can make my servers.
The other option is to have some other system do the email hosting, and if it is through my domain then there should be no issues with moving around if needed. Hosting all the email archive isn’t really needed either, I’d be fine self hosting or storing the archive.
Is there a set up where some remote service handles email exchange, and you just sync with it eg through POP style interfaces? Id actually prefer if my own server was doing the sync rather than a desktop running Thunderbird etc, that way it is kind of self hosted but also robust to down time. What’s the best practice along these lines?
Yup, that’s signing up for a email provider. I wouldn’t call that self hosting since you’re just referring to email client software on your end to store the emails that are being synchronized at the email provider’s hosted server(s).
IMAP is sync so that might be what you meant. POP is even older but that’s for downloading only. And SMTP is for sending.
Those all still exist, most paid email providers still offer them just make sure to check before signing up. It’s harder to find that with free email providers, they usually disable IMAP/POP/SMTP on free accounts.