It's a decent amount of upkeep and cost, but I get paid do it for a bunch of clients who desire this for their companies and have my own which is humming along

It's a decent amount of upkeep and cost, but I get paid do it for a bunch of clients who desire this for their companies and have my own which is humming along great. If you go the route of a script to set everything up I found iredmail to be the most mature and reliable solution, even if the upgrade path is super manual at least it gives you a chance to know at what point things went wrong rather than having to pour over logs to fix something broken that is running in production. It also pairs nicely with open source failover solutions and if you need enterprise support they're extremely responsive. Bonus points for getting it working with your phone for backups of contacts, calendar and notes with CalDAV or whatever to really decouple yourself from cloud services with shady terms (I had to pay for an app on my phone for this to really work, but it works great). Setting your whole mailserver up manually is also an option , but be prepared to sink like a month of time into learning how the hell to do that. This is technology from the 1970s with a ton to get it working in the modern world after all. Just be wary that you'll have to upgrade kinda often. I keep subscribed to github alerts for iredmail as they're really prompt about notifying their customers when they need to patch security holes.