>These home server boxes never include self-hosting email. Is it because anyone running their own SMTP is assumed to be a spammer? Yes, that's part of the issu

>These home server boxes never include self-hosting email. Is it because anyone running their own SMTP is assumed to be a spammer? Yes, that's part of the issue. Because many home computers got infected by viruses to become bots sending bulk spam, email sourced from residential ip addresses became "guilty until proven innocent". Even the recent $499 "home email appliance" such as Helm[1][2][3] for private encrypted email ends up using a centralized service such as Amazon AWS for the routing of email packets. >Oh, they'll let you have multiple email addresses for a low rate, but as soon as you want multiple mailboxes (which is just a separate directory as far as the server is concerned), suddenly I'm paying way way more. If you don't need business-class type of email service ("business" meaning Outlook sync, shared calendars, 99.999% uptime, etc), then the cheapest way I found for multiple mailboxes is a shared hosting plan. E.g. I pay $49/year for 5 website domains that includes email hosting with unlimited mailboxes. Not just unlimited addresses/aliases but mailboxes. Shared hosting is way cheaper than the $144/year that Rackspace charges for just 5 mailboxes. [1] https://thehelm.com/ https://thehelm.com/ [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal-server-gets-email-self-hosting-almost-exactly-right/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal... [3] TWIS also had a 1 hour discussion with Helm's CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BhOreZKXPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BhOreZKXPA