Thoms

That's not true. I run my own email server for 15+ years now. There are only 5 of 6 mailboxes. I never had a problem with any other host. Not Microsoft, not Google. Maybe, the reason was, the IP was also 15+ years assigned to the same domain. I have only known senders, family and friends.

The last days, the hole subnet was blacklisted on some blacklists. So that was not my fault, the growing business of the provider lead to this situation. Eventually I moved to a very small provider and run a mail cow on a vps. On a fresh IP without any reputation. Same 'customers', the only issue was with T-Online in Germany, but a mail solved this. To keep this kind of issues away, I use sendgrid as a SMTP forward. With only a few mails per day, this is free. Mailcow provides a lot of features, rspam filtering, a lot better and faster than spamassin. Active sync, imap, webmail, everything. Solid backup, runs without any problem.

Just take a look at https://docs.mailcow.email/

This runs from a small box with everything included. It gives you all the tools and config needed for running a secure and feature rich email service. Webmail, some sort of exchange emulation, webcalender on top of a solid postfix/dovecot install with rspamd as spam filter. Everything is configurable via a nice web UI.

After 15y running my own mail service and editing a lot of config files, I use this piece of free and open software and find it very good. All you need is a box somewhere in the internet. Running from a homelab will instantly fail, expect you have a static ip.

Don't forget, iMessage is not using SMS. It's like WhatsApp or all other messengers, but Apple only. It uses the same app, but that's it. And yes, no one pays for texts, because all plans have texts included. Some prepaid plans maybe.

I'm trying Sync, Infinity and Thunder. I like Sync and Thunder because I like the polished UI. Infinity looks and feels kinda 'old'. But this is just me. All three deliver the feeling of coming home. They work like before, but with Lemmy features like images in comments. It's like Reddit but on the fediverse.

mailcow lists a small german vps hoster with a fair price and the right sizing. It's not a big hoster, gmail and microsoft are not blocking the ip-range and the ASN is not listed on any blacklist.

The support is quick and helpful, rDNS was a matter of minutes to set up. You don't need any deeper knowlegde of docker, since it is a one-time job to set the things up und get the stack running. The documentation of mailcow is very good.

You can run it from home, but you will need a forward host like sendgrid and maybe a backup mx. You can set a primary ip and a backup ip wich will get all the mails when the primary host is down. I guess, there a comercial or free backup-mx services out there. No problem. If you have a static ip for your homelab or at least a dynamic dns-name, it will work. Recieving is easy. But you will need a good forward-service for sending.

That's right. Also important, email is not a playground for experiments. Once it runs, you should not touch it anymore, except for updates. Otherwise, you will do harm to your own way of communicating. One error, and you will lose all your reputation and someone spams half of the internet with your domain as sender.

An when it runs, the only thing to improve is tuning the spam-filter for your instance. Implementing all the rules that you fight the other day, because otherwise your inbox explodes. So you have to do all the shady things and block ips, filter with blacklists and check every dns for all those extra entries, needed for delivering mail... You must become a part of the problem, spammers all behind every cracked wordpress and insecure vps out there.