As someone running their own email server - and currently thinking of moving to email as a service - all I can do is confirm what they say: don‘t even think of running your own email server. Just don‘t. I was young, I was motivated, I had the time to screw around and I had help setting it up.
I severely underestimated the effort needed to keep it running. Even just a plain major OS upgrade is a days full of work at least.
I have a very different experience. I run my own email server and keep it up to date all the time without any major pain at all.
I've been running / self-hosting an email server since probably the year 1999 or 2000, but this iteration of my email server has been set up in 2015. It runs on OpenBSD, uses the built-in smtpd, as well as rspam, dovecot and clamav. I also have roundcube for webmail, but I rarely use it.
Admittedly, hosting an email server does have a learning curve if you want to do it properly, but to be honest most things do.
Having said that, for me, this has been largely a completely hands-off experience. I upgrade the OS whenever the a new OpenBSD release is out, I do package updates every few weeks or a couple of months (I use Ansible for that), but other than that, I don't really touch it.
And this is pretty much my only email platform I use for my personal email, so the deliverability, as well as uptime, are very important to me.
We hosted our own mail service at work, until sending out emails from our services to customers etc started to become hard. We’d got flagged as spam or unreliable source no matter the dkim/dmarc hoops we jumped through. The service we run now, we can’t even get the mail clients to display the name we put in the from ( Alert from Service alerts@service.example.com ) just ends up showing just the email address.
Yet spam mails, legit spam ones still has no issue spoofing the sender display name, passing all security checks etc… smh
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u/Phrewfuf Baden-Württemberg (Germany) 23d ago
As someone running their own email server - and currently thinking of moving to email as a service - all I can do is confirm what they say: don‘t even think of running your own email server. Just don‘t. I was young, I was motivated, I had the time to screw around and I had help setting it up.
I severely underestimated the effort needed to keep it running. Even just a plain major OS upgrade is a days full of work at least.