After messing with POP3 and local mail clients (before Gmail was a thing) I decided that I wanted my emails in a Maildir, so I started to host them on Dovecot o

After messing with POP3 and local mail clients (before Gmail was a thing) I decided that I wanted my emails in a Maildir, so I started to host them on Dovecot on the LAN, which made it easy to backup all my mail and move around. The local server would POP them from any (of multiple) services and serve them to clients that needed access. I would take my mailserver with me on travels and during moves (multiple countries) and use DDNS where necessary to access mails outside the home (currently using an old BananaPi as hardware has gotten smaller). I've had domains for decades as well, and started out receiving mail using services that came with the domain name registration. For sending I would use the ISP, later Gmail, but settled on MXroute which is very affordable and has good deliverability. I als started using it for MX, but after a few years decided that I really want to receive any and all mails sent to me, so for the past few years I have run Postfix (with a few failovers) with trimmings like SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc. This all works OK, and doesn't cost a lot.