This Microsoft outage being the last drop in the bucket, I’m looking to get my email/calendar/contacts somewhere under my control.
As I already self-host a number of things (e.g. my Linux ISO collection), and have services exposed to the internet, it would make sense to run it at home.
After all, it’s not heavy lifting. It’s not hosting 500+ mailboxes for 100+ people. It’s just little old me, with a handful of domains, catch-all receiving and a few dedicated sending addresses.
However email is a bit more mission critical than my smarthome control or self hosted LLMs. Downtime could be critically bad, and I still don’t trust my home setup to be truly 99.999999% available.
I don’t mind paying for a service but if I do I’d prefer something European, given I’m based in the UK (and otherwise am an EU citizen).
I’m really curious how y’all solve it. I guess I’m interested in some kind of hybrid solution where there’s my own server and a hosted service, latter which acts as a backup solution, but still fully synced, so if my internet or power goes out (or my server goes down), I can still get mail sent and delivered.
So I’m not only just interested in the stack you run for email but the entire infrastructure, especially if you’ve solved this sort of off-site fallback service.
I (not EU) self host my email on a vultr VPS. I use the classic dovecot + postfix setup, IMAP for clients, spamd (spamassassin) for extra filtering, etc., etc… I’ve got SPF+DKIM+DMARC, a couple different domains, the whole nine yards, just for hobbying that’s grown over the years for family members.
All that said, unless you’re pretty dang familiar with all those things, I personally would agree with the several people who have just pointed to smaller-time email providers that support custom domain names. It gives you the control to pull it back to your own server later if you want to take on that endeavor (via simply DNS updates), but means you don’t have to worry about the complex bits now. I would definitely not recommend hosting it in your own home - not because of availability issues or anything like that (as others mentioned, legitimate email providers retry by policy, so you don’t need quad-nine uptime), but because most residential IPs, at least by default, are going to get blocked by most providers for being on a common policy blocklist - that is, your ISP likely tells e.g. spamhaus that your IP is residential and shouldn’t be sending email. If you have a business internet plan, that changes. And I could also be wrong for UK; I’ve just got US knowledge on that particular bit.
If you’re familiar with all the bits of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and want to go for it, a VPS would be my recommendation. Note: many block outbound to port 25 by default to prevent spam bots abusing their IPs, so you’ll need to keep that in consideration. Otherwise, one of the email providers mentioned is probably a good bet.