I was about to swipe away because I have no clue what Stash is.

I’m still about to swipe away but with the knowledge I might actually use this.

Glad to hear! It’s a lot I won’t lie, but I look forward to it. I finally have everything i need in place.

I want more control than those platforms offer me. I also want to separate out a lot of components like dns and other stuff. I want to more deeply integrate it into my existing infrastructure. And my current mail server was built before a lot of my now backbone infrastructure. It’s time to retire the server and replace it with what I need now. They’re VPS so i don’t feel bad, that’s part of the point. I have a harder time retiring actual hardware

Chiming in as another email self hoster; yes it comes with headaches but I can’t imagine it any other way. I use Mailinabox but am working on migrating over to the ISPMail setup. I don’t think that there’s any issues with self hosting mail and we need to stop discouraging it. There AIO solutions genuinely work well. If you’re concerned about stability then hold updates back until you can confirm that the newer versions are stable. Yes it is difficult and I don’t think most people should do it, but self hosters should be encouraged to do so if they feel capable and willing to take on the workload. We need more diversity in email hosting to prevent making it impossible. I also have no issues sending to large providers like gmail and the builtin nextcloud Integra is really nice. Unsure I’ll rebuild nextcloud but i might.

I think maintainability has a lot to do with it as well, and what you consider maintainable. I see a lot of interesting setups on here but some of the bigger ones I’m iffy about because authentication or some other critical, lower level protocol is outsourced. To some that sounds great and is easily maintained, but I don’t personally consider those super maintainable or sustainable for my setups. I prefer to take the greybeard method and do it all myself. As such, when time comes to do maintenance yeah I have more burden on myself but it’s a burden that I explicitly put on myself and that I enjoy.

For anyone who wants to do this easily: afaik (ymmv) most mail systems will accept aliases to your account if you put a + after your email username. for example, if you’re foo@example.com, then foo+bar@example.com would still route to your inbox but you’d be able to see that it was sent to a different address than your own. i do this for any email i put into a website I don’t trust (which is most) and if you use the company name it’s a really easy way to see who sold your data

The easiest email solution imo is Mail in a box. it’s fairly easy to setup by their guide

Vaultwarden is a fork of Bitwarden with a few more features enabled and some minor (although potentially important) differences. It works with any Bitwarden front end. It’s on my todo to eventually migrate to from Bitwarden for the free TOTP

I both love and hate this. I love to see IRC getting some love and these features are massive QoL improvements. I say this as a regular IRC user. On the other hand though, no touch da fishy.

I only share my services with two groups of people: my girlfriend and my technical friends. These services do include critical ones like password managers. I’m ok doing this because a.) the services i choose to use won’t prevent access to the data even if my server goes down and b.) my girlfriend understands its a one man band and my technical friends also self host so there’s an expectation of down time. I wouldn’t be comfortable with sharing what I host with anyone else though.

I think your assessment is pretty accurate as for me it wasn’t difficult to learn or understand, but I have a technical background and did when I was learning it. I learned how it does thins and why. I think most people who encounter it just want it to work, and like a lot of tech it’s just magic to them once it starts working