Email/calendar/contacts on EU server: posteo.de

They support IMAP and DAV

Mail is something I don’t want to touch. I use mailbox which is hosted in germany for some years now. For calendar & contacts I use the built-in Nextcloud apps, they also work pretty well

I’ve self-hosted email for over 20 years but I’m now moving to Fastmail for two reasons: (1) succession, I’m the only one in my house that understands how it works, and (2) email is never fully under your control and the large providers may decide to filter/drop email from your domain. But this is self-hosted, and I did enjoy my years doing it, so go for it if you want. I had good luck with OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD/Dovecot stack. Good luck!

Edit: I forgot to mention you can do a hybrid approach; handle receiving yourself and use a service like smtp2go.com to do delivery.

I just pay Hetzner 2.50-ish euros per month for their cheapest mail hosting offer and call it a day. I did self-host mail for quite some time, it was a huge PITA to set up and keep working. Every now and then I even had issues with my mails not being delivered to outlook addresses (f u M$), so I just gave it up and switched to Hetzner. Their cheapest plan even includes one domain, so depending on the domain you choose, it’s not even 1€ per month for the actual email hosting

Self-hosting email is like making your own butter.

It’s possible, but most people don’t want to take it on themselves.

Calendar and contacts I’d argue are good candidates to self host. If a config is off and you can’t access them for a day or two, does it matter?

But if email is down, you risk missing something important. If you have a trust issue and everything you send is getting flagged as spam? Hard and slow to fix.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is Flaky and Unethical Big Tech, I would look at finding another, smaller provider and paying for it. Rolling it yourself is a great way to learn entirely too much about mail servers and spending way too much of your free time on it.

I host my email, just not at home but on a rented server.

Here I documented it all https://wiki.gardiol.org/4-e-mail-hosting

It works, its been working for decades now. Never had significant issues…

Email is quite resilient. Servers keep trying to send again and again messages for hours before they give up… So a backup server is not even really required.

I built a system to solve all that. Completely Foss. I’m self employed and needed it for my work. Davx for carddav, caldav, tasks etc. Email via postfix/dovecot and sogo for web interface and syncing. All working seamlessly for any custom domain. I give these out to my bigger customers usually as a free addon. But it’s realiable and safe and hosted in Germany (not at home) with offsite backup in the Netherlands. How much space are you looking for?

If incoming emails bounce, normal email servers will see that and retry later. Not that I personally deal with email- I outsource it to Disroot.org :)

I ended up just paying for a private host. Now’s the time of year to find one, with all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions taking place.

Email’s not nearly as hard to host as people make it out to be. It is intimidating, yes, and there are a few very specific gotchas that make it infeasible or impractical from most if not all home internet connections, but if you’re willing to outsource just a little bit on that one particular point so that you have a static, commercial-grade IP address somewhere that you can get reverse DNS and open up SMTP ports on, the rest of it is mostly just fighting with your usual, standard self-hosting struggles of getting it configured and working at all, then making sure it’s secure and stays secure, and making sure your data is protected. The setup might be slightly more advanced than some other services just due to the number of moving parts, but it’s not fundamentally any different than a webserver. There are some other issues that might crop up a little later in the game, managing your mail server’s reputation for not sending spam (especially if, at some point, someone DOES get access and starts sending spam, you need to figure out how to recover your reputation). But overall it’s manageable, I’ve been self-hosting my email for like 30 years. It sucks, but it’s worth it.

I have run my own mail server for 20+ years. I set up everything correctly, including DKIM and DMARC. I have had the same IPs for 10 years. I send <100 emails a month. A few years ago Google started putting most of my emails in spam, and Microsoft started silently deleting them. They will not fix it. I had to start paying for a relay for outgoing messages.

Use migadu.com.

I run Maddy on a VPS. It’s pretty much trouble-free.

My domain’s mail is hosted at https://purelymail.com/ $10/year. They seem to run on AWS hardware, so it’s not free of US big tech. It’s dirt cheap, but I’ve never had any problems, either receiving or sending. They have very clear instructions for getting your domain’s mail set up.

Receiving email isn’t too bad. Get a domain, set up dovecot and postfix, maybe a web frontend if you care. They’re in basically every distribution’s repos. I’m sure there’s a mess of containers for it too, if that’s your thing. Just have to make sure your ISP doesn’t block port 25.

Sending email, however, is a different beast. You need to have a stable, clean, IP address. Then setup all the extra stuff on top (DKIM, SPF, etc.)

Your dynamic IP from your home ISP isn’t going to cut it. If you can get a static IP, it might work, otherwise you need a tunnel or to host everything in the cloud, somewhat defeating the point.

Once you have a stable IP, and have the proper DNS records/certs set up, you begin the battle of getting your IP allowlisted. If you’re lucky, the IP will be clean-ish and not flagged. If it’s flagged, you’re basically screwed and need to get another IP. Then you have to test sending email to all the big providers and contact the ones that don’t allow your messages through. It’s a long process. It’s possible, but tedious.

I ran my own mail server for three years. It was fun, but also a lot.

The fallback part is the hardest bit of what you’re describing, because true active-active mail is a lot of work for one person. A simpler setup that gets you most of it:

• Run your main mail server at home like you planned, and put a second, identical one on a small cheap VPS as a warm standby. Point a second MX record at the VPS with a lower priority, so when your home server is unreachable, sending servers deliver there instead and the mail just waits for you.
• Sync the mailboxes between the two on a schedule (there are tools that do mailbox-to-mailbox sync over IMAP), or at least keep nightly backups of the mail data on the VPS so you can restore quickly. FYI, the standby doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to hold your mail untill you’re back.
• For certs, use DNS-based validation for the mail hostnames so both servers can hold valid certs for the same names without fighting over HTTP validation. That way TLS works whichever box is answering.
• Send outbound through a relay with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for your domain, rather than directly from your home IP, which keeps deliverability sane.
• And honestly, keep calendar and contacts on a seperate lightweight server, so a mail outage doesn’t take those down too. Mail servers retry delivery for days, so a short home outage rarely loses mail at all. The thing you’re really protecting against is a long one, and the standby MX covers that.