I’ve recently been trying to degoogle myself, and in doing so I’m going to need another email. I tried ProtonMail, but apparently only business accounts can use SMTP, even though their features claim SMTP access. I’m plenty fine paying for the service, but going from the $6/month to $12/month just to get notification emails from my server doesn’t seem worth it to me. I’ve not looked into what all else comes with Proton’s Business features, but i’m not really running a business or trying to start one up.
What do you use? do you like it? How’s the cost/features?
I used to run my own email for years. Started on qmail, postfix+dovecot. Anti-spam (spamassassin for a while, rspamd), spf+dkim+dmarc, srs, arc-signing for forwards. All kinds of other tools, even wrote some of my own. I’ve learned a lot and pretty much ran the gamut to be honest.
So all that said, nowadays I just host with mxroute. Bought a lifetime plan. There’s features it doesn’t have but it’s good enough to get emails and a lot easier than self hosting.
I generally recommend finding a host that has the features you want at a price that seems fair. Email is the kind of thing that needs to just always work.
Once you set it up sure, it’s rock solid. Until one day you realize your emails are getting dropped and there’s some new thing you’ve gotta look into. Let somebody else handle it.