After hosting my own for 20 years or so my experience is: The flexibility and control is worth it, as others here point out. The early days (ha) were simple;

After hosting my own for 20 years or so my experience is: The flexibility and control is worth it, as others here point out. The early days (ha) were simple; now you need to learn a few things like SPF and DKIM, but those are pretty simple compared with figuring out why your sound isn’t working on Linux, etc. Once you set it up it’s practically zero maintenance. Postfix and Dovecot are amazing, bulletproof programs. I don’t jump through any hoops to get my mail delivered. My attitude is, if you’re not getting my mail, your mail service is broken, and you need to complain to your provider or find a better one. Since setting up DKIM, etc., I have essentially zero deliverability problems. Maybe that’s partly due to the age of my domains and servers, and lucking in to a good IP. Before that I had occasional problems with hotmail, etc. See previous paragraph. My self-hosted email is faster, better, and more reliable than the service provided by any of the big players, especially Gmail. I have a Gmail account for last-straw failover (never needed) and some mailing lists. Such a poor quality service. In 2022 adults still communicate primarily through email. All my business is over email. It’s too important to leave to Google.