Technology

Owning a domain for yourself and having a provider send/receive email on your behalf is a common choice, and it has its own benefits such as being able to migrate to other providers easily. As long as you renew your domain properly, it should be fine. Though do note that only you would use that domain, so anyone would know it was you who sent that email.

Owning a domain for yourself AND handling email sending/receiving can be challenging because there's a chance your email gets filtered as spam, and the receiver doesn't get what you sent. It's also possible that your server goes down, and the email sent to you doesn't arrive properly, though the email server usually try to send again a number of times before giving up.

If you are confident about setting a server, I can personally recommend Mailcow. As long as you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, it should pass most spam filter including Gmail. If you don't want to deal with the potential headache, getting a provider to send/receive emails for you is a good choice too.

there is a lot to hosting mail. Reading about it, like this book will educate you about all that’s involved.

I do aliases through simplelogin and have my domain hosted on mxroute.

My domain is my real last name...so I have subdomains like @myfirst.lastname.com gets pointed to simplelogin for aliases, which then forwards to mxroute. @mywifesfirst.lastname.com goes to the same simplelogin and points to her Gmail for now.

Mxroute is cheap and they've got decent web apps but really more made for traditional IMAP clients. And they don't really do groupware...just email. But that's really the hardest part, from an admin perspective.

Adminning email is getting to be a sacred art. It's a lot of work and a constant arms race both against incoming spam, and the spam filters for whoever you are sending to. A whole ton of work for what is really an essential Internet service (when I can't get into my credit card account because enom is slacking on forwarding mail, it's a problem...and also why I switched to simplelogin).

For how cheap mxroute is, IMO, absolutely not worth the effort of self-hosting unless it's actually your day job and you get some sick sadistic pleasure out of doing it on your own time.

The mxroute admin/owner himself also seems like a pretty chill guy. He's been pretty forward and transparent on Reddit and lowendbox.

Edit to add: important stuff...make sure that you have an email address that you don't host, to access stuff you need to for the stuff that you do (i.e. DNS, mail hoster, MFA provider, directory service, etc). I use a free proton for that.

Rolling your own email is a pain. That said, I use a VPS and host my own server with domain name and site for $5/month. Setting it up was a pain, but once you get all the records right so you're not considered spam, it works really well. That said, I haven't done anything with webmail; I strictly use IMAP and SMTP.

grab a personal domain, setup smtp through proton then have your local mail client archive via imap

email is the only service i would never self-host directly.