You can host your own email. I do. What you can't do easily is talk to other large public email servers. Which I don't. My home email server receives email

You can host your own email. I do. What you can't do easily is talk to other large public email servers. Which I don't. My home email server receives email I send to it, but won't forward email to other domains. This is very useful - basically anything on the iPhone is shareable via email, so now I can capture a copy of things outside of the phone easily and privately from anywhere without having to go through an untrusted third party such as Google. In addition to having SMTP setup, I have IMAP setup, so I can retrieve email from my phone or other email client that various other self-hosted services on my local network generate, or my desktop PC running Thunderbird. I do have to monitor logs as I get regular password-guessing attempts on the services. I have a script that checks for repeated failed logins or other bad behaviors and adds malicious IPs to a blocklist ipset. It would be interesting to federate with others and participate in a private SMTP network. I'm sure these already exist.