Email is basically pointless to host yourself from a privacy perspective. Every email has one or more people on the other end that also get a copy. Privacy and email are mutually exclusive. That said, the alternative doesn't have to be something like gmail, where they can do whatever they want with your data. I use Fastmail and that's "sufficiently private" for my needs.
TODO: need a non-fastmail backup of my email
Or if you forgot to pay your apple card you don't loose access to the email etc.
I think diversification is valuable here.
I am super salty that Sony banned my PlayStation account(used by my son) for 2 months (I have a Plus subscription paid for 1 year too) without no way for me to see the exact reason (was it a text message, or a screenshot that was shared, or just a report from an troll) and no way to contest this. I made my decision and fuck consoles my son will have to learn to use a medium spec PC for gaming.
I also worry about that. What I do is sync gmail with outlook.com. Now I worry that I just doubled my risk of falling victim to a security breach :-)
About 5 years ago, I read the O’Reilly book, Postfix: The Definitive Guide that had been sitting in my book-shelf for years. I installed and configured Postfix as a sending-only mail server on a Hetzner VPS. I sent a few test emails to GMail accounts and a friend’s Office 365 and they both worked! I then gradually added extra layers of functionality (TLS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC).
Once I was happy that I could successfully send emails, the next step was to receive email: I added MX records for my domain and opened port 25 on the firewall. I was able to use Mutt over SSH to read emails sent to my account. I later installed Dovecot (excellent documentation) and Squirrelmail (lacking in features but was easy to install). I don’t really use web-mail but I’ll probably install Roundcube at some stage and I plan to learn how to use Sieve for automatic filtering.
I thought I’d have serious problems with spam and have to install anti-spam software and/or use black-lists but that hasn’t (yet) been an issue. Simply using Postfix default options along with grey-listing and not accepting messages from invalid (according to SPF records) sources blocks all spam. The only times I received spam was when I had accidentally disabled the grey-listing (the mail logs show I get hundreds of connection attempts with only a tenth of successful connections being genuine). The system actually works better than GMail in that I don’t miss messages that were wrongly flagged as Spam. Another benefit of self-hosting is that I can quickly and easily set up account-specific email addresses, e.g., <hackernews@example.com> – no need for <anthony+hackernews@example.com>
I gradually started using it instead of GMail and it’s now my primary email account for important communication. In the four years of serious use, I haven’t had any problems (touch wood).
And of course SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all prerequisites.
But if you can avoid the first two problems, hosting email yourself is rock-solid reliable and requires very little attention.
Most hosting providers with a $3/mo CPanel option gives you an out-of-the-box, highly configurable email server.