I think everyone has done this. I know I have. I believe I used dmda to recover all my photos back. Unfortunately I lost all the metadata for about 3000 photos. It took years to manually retap and redate them all but at least I didn’t lose them forever

The complex part isn’t the hosting part. Its the security part, the reputation management part, the uptime part, the troubleshooting delivery part and basically every other aspect other than running postfix+dovecot

Hosting your own email is a bad idea. Hosting OTHER PEOPLE’S email is a REALLY BAD idea. Self-hosting mail on a vanity domain is a good exercise to learn how SMTP, DNS, IMAP and other protocols interact.

If you don’t like Google, Apple, or Microsoft then sign them up with Proton or another hosted provider. You don’t want to be the reason someone lost income because they missed out on a critical email from a client or their job application was blocked because it was sent from a host with poor reputation.

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. If you use apple devices and pay for iCloud+ ($1.99 a month for the cheapest plan), you can get email hosting for your domain for the entire family + a catch all address.

You can run an email host yourself but it is going to cost more in time and effort to maintain than just paying for hosting. It’s not very professional if your messages go to spam due to low reputation or if you miss a message/someone gets a bounce back because the container running your mail server was down and you didn’t realize

Run mail on a custom domain for fun, to learn what it takes, but don’t do it for mail that really matters

Apple is a hardware company first, not an advertising and services company like Google and Roku, and not a literal massive online retailer like Amazon.

Apple TV is the only one that doesn’t have ads on its home screen. I use an Apple TV to play all my physical media that has been ripped to mov and re-encoded with handbrake

I did the exact same thing 3 or so years ago. Thankfully I already had a backup but it was a bit nerve wracking to log in to next cloud and it was empty and then browsing the mount and having it also be empty

Thank you! That’s a clear and concise explanation of section 230. I’ve always heard it in reference to big social media companies but your link clearly shows the protections extend to individuals and users as well

Are individuals granted the same 230 protections as organizations when it comes to self-hosting an instance? I doubt people are forming non-profits for their self hosting endeavors

That’s part of the cost benefit equation for self hosted vs cloud hosted.

I got tired of dealing with maintenance on my VPS and on my on-prem hardware and so now I pretty much just do SaaS or run front ends that connect to public cloud backends

If you are just sending notification emails to your own account then you can use SMTP directly to O365 without authentication and it will be delivered as long as it’s being sent within your tenant (if your home IP isn’t in your SPF record it may get delivered to junk however)

This is how we handle scan to email using MFPs in our org. No credentials, or even a mailbox for the outgoing sender, required