I am, almost surprised to read that you, on your self hosting journey, were not also self hosting email!
Then again, I probably began on the self hosting journey so long ago that it was more of a collaborative hosting (because computer resources were scarce and expensive and so BBSes and such were doing out best to share them with others) era (my first Internet accessible email address was UUCP, not SMTP; and I had other email systems in use before that too!)? So the bygone days of when sendmail had "wiz" and spam was not yet a reality? I miss.
At some point, I had been getting paid to run mailservers for employers for so long, I had more or less given up on it for personal use and let others with their free tiers handle that sort of thing.
Distressingly, it seems as if the free tiers of companies, can no longer be trusted as most have fallen prey to the realms of surveillance capitalism, so I too am in the process of going back to some sort of self hosted paradigm, for email of all things!?
I should have hoped by 2026, we would have all long since migrated to realtime end-to-end encrypted communications systems with Perfect Forward Secrecy and naturally, libre/free open source software implementations such as SILC; yet it seems as if the popularity of that fell by the wayside as the hegemonic powers that be foisted their bassackwardsness on the world? I know better is possible, since I already was using better contentedly, long ago.
These days? The "S" in SMTP, no longer seems meaningful; such a pity.
I am certain that you can take your self hosting lessons to the realms of email and be OK with it. Administering MTAs (Mail Transfer Agents) isn't the worst thing in the world; personally I prefer Postfix to sendmail; yet qmail presumably still functions? There are also OpenSMTPD from the OpenBSD developers now, and newer "gee-whiz" sorts of all-in-one thingamajiggers e.g.
https://www.xmox.nl and
https://stalw.art (the latter of which I am least familiar with and also seems to perhaps utilize LLMs to some degree?) which maybe also include calendaring and IMAP, etc. support?
Good luck on your continuing journey! Even as I, probably need to go back to some areas with which I was once all too well versed and apparently have let lapse in the intermediary years hoping that we may have moved on from such things, like the joke:
"Could you fax over a copy?"
"No, I can't fax because of where I live."
"Where do you live?"
"The 21st century."
To me at least? A
good new technology, does not cling to the past.
So, any "web" service, still requesting an email address? IMHO, is not a good one.
SILC, did not require an email address.
Contrast with, e.g. Signal, which requires a phone number?
Even
worse. At least email addresses (e.g. SMTP) have a multiplicity of libre/free open source implementations and that will presumably, always be true. Attempting to get phone numbers (sure there are projects such as OpenBTS, Asterisk, which provide VoIP functionality, yet they are the minority; the telephony realms are predominantly still promulgated by an entrenched,
convicted monopoly). Based on that
alone Signal use should be discouraged. Alas, there are many other good reasons to discourage usage of Signal.
