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Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He’s covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he’s also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023.

He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn’t exactly go back together afterward. That’s given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he’s gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then.

Email is one of those things that most people use daily without much thought about how, where, or why those messages get to where they’re supposed to be. Even though I know Gmail is scanning my inbox to serve me ads, and that email delivery is insecure and complicated, I put that to the back of my mind and soldier on, because the alternative is much, much worse.

Before I dive in deeper, I realize that in many countries, those who choose to self-host their email servers don’t encounter the same issues I’ve experienced in the USA. Not every ISP routinely blocks the port email needs for incoming and outgoing traffic. Not every ISP is large enough to need CG-NAT or other tricks to increase its IP allocation to customers. And not every ISP charges a small fortune for static IPs, but here we are.

For those fortunate few, having an email server you control means your data isn’t being accessed by anyone else (except for the copy in the other person’s inbox, because you can be relatively sure they’re not self-hosting). But for everyone else, it’s a headache waiting to happen, and I won’t host it anymore.

Self-hosting email servers is a constant pain

Maintenance never stops

For most self-hosted services, a little blip in uptime is no big deal. Well, unless it’s the DNS server or ad blocker for your network, and then it’s a big deal instantly, as the household discovers they can’t reach the internet. Email isn’t particularly touchy, and the system is set to retry sending several times before it says the email was undeliverable. Still, it’s a Sisyphean task to get the uptime of your average data center.

Take tonight, for example. Snow plus high winds meant my internet service went out, and then the power did, and then my Wi-Fi on my computer went odd because it was partly through updating Windows when the power went out, and all of that added up to none of my browser windows being able to connect to the internet until I rebooted. That’s just one night, but your email server needs to be available 365 days a year for most of the day, or you will lose email.

You can mitigate issues with a third-party outbound (or inbound) relay, which stores emails on its server on the way through, then sends them to you or the recipients if you’re sending them out. But how different is that from a cloud email provider, if you’re still going to pay a similar subscription fee for the privilege?

But hey, at least your data is yours, and you’re not paying extra for it

One of the main reasons people want to self-host email servers is to avoid the storage creep of cloud email providers. They all hook you with a few gigabytes of free data, then once you get near the limit, you’ll be constantly bombarded with ads to increase your storage, or the provider will stop letting you receive emails.

I can appreciate that, but self-hosting isn’t free, even if it seems that way. Your costs no longer go to a cloud provider that handles security, storage, and reputation for you, but they do go somewhere. Increased electricity costs from having your email server running 24/7. The price of buying a NAS enclosure, filling it with hard drives, and the time it takes you to learn the new skills and set things up.

These are not trivial costs, and you’ll need a yearly fee, plus possibly a VPS or port-forwarding service, because USA-based ISPs block port 25 and put your home IP behind layers of CG-NAT so that email will get lost on the way otherwise. Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ownership of your email data, but there are things to consider before you start.

Your connectivity and deliverability are affected by factors you have no control over

From ISP blocks to bad actors using the same servers, you’re in for an uphill battle

Email is one of the oldest computing protocols still in active use, and it had almost no security features when it was new. Over the years the security and authentication layers have turned email hosting into a literal house of cards, where the slightest issue threatens to knock it all down.

Sending an email is trivial. Ensuring it reaches the intended recipient is very tricky indeed. Large email providers routinely filter emails from smaller, newer senders, especially if the domain’s reputation can’t be established. And since everything is reputation-based, only the longest-running and largest email providers are trusted enough.

Then there are spam filters, antivirus filters, and IP blocklists that might include your server IP because someone else was sending spam or malware. Plus, you need to have security on your server so it doesn’t get taken over and used to send spam.

And it’s almost impossible to get your IP address taken off those lists. There’s no one authority to contact, and the number of overlapping lists means even removal from one list might not fix the issue.

Residential ISPs actively try to thwart you

If you don’t have a business plan from your ISP, you don’t have to worry about the other email providers because your ISP will block you first. Port 25 is routinely blocked in both directions by almost every USA-based ISP, as spammers were sending email from everywhere they could. VPNs are blocked too for similar reasons, and it’s a constant cat-and-mouse game between ISPs, email providers, and spammers, where nobody really wins.

My email can stay in a managed provider where it belongs

One of my home lab maxims is that I’ll pay others to do the things I do not want to handle myself, and email is right at the top of the list. If you don’t like the thought of Yahoo! or Gmail scanning your inbox, sign up for one of the few privacy-respecting email providers because the subscription fee is worth it.