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?
The difficulty of self hosting your own email is high, but if you aim to do it, i would recommend Stalwart for self hosting. POP is not what you want as other people are saying. There is also a newer protocal to IMAP called JMAP.
Some things to consider are your inbound and outbound mail paths.
For incoming: Do you have a VPS to be your entry point? Or do you plan to port forward (assuming you even can given the prevalence of CGNAT)? There is also a way to teach a web worker like the kind cloudflare let’s you use for free to break the email down and POST it to a listener in your server across a tunnel and the listener can put it back together into an email at your server and drop it off. That being the only way I have found to get inbound mail behind a double NAT (CGNAT) without a VPS.
For outbound, if you send stuff to major SMTP providers from a residential IP they will block it or mark as spam pretty heavily. You may want to consider a relay to make sure people actually see what you send. Brevo has a free tier, SMTP2Go is solid. There are others as well.
There are other considerations like how will the end user interact with the mail server? I host a Bulwark instance and really love what they are doing with the project, but there are quite a few options for that.
If you end up giving it a go, good luck, and know that it is possible!