I have been thinking of completely going off Google. I have a Nextcloud server for documents and contacts and calendar. Thinking of moving mail away too. Currently I am conflicted between hosting my own email server. On searching only advice I am getting is not to do it.
How many of the homelabers do host their own email server? What software do you use? Any tips.
Incoming mail is very doable.
Outgoing mail is hard because no one will your trust your server, the easy way is let someone else send your mail.
People get stressed about your receiving server being down sometimes, but this actually not a big deal. Mail senders typically will try for 48 hours or so to deliver mail, and if it doesn’t get delivered it will be sent back to the sender with a “could not be delivered” message. Very little gets actually lost.
The thing that got me to pay someone else to host my mail is having outbound blocked by google/Microsoft all the time for no reason.
There are reasons, and you can fix them if you know what you’re doing. That’s what DMARC reports are for.