Make sure your ublock skills are up to snuff, it’s full of ads

I think you tend to get flagged as spam from Gmail and the like very easily, making useless

I have. My main problem wasn’t so much that I was getting flagged as spam, but that the spam filtering on the receiving side was just awful. I also don’t send many emails so it may well be the case that I just happened to not experience that problem.

You need to get your email into some big data databases. It’s fucking bullshit, but until your address is tracked by all the snooping bullshit companies, a lot of services will reject it. They run checks with services like Informatica to verify if it’s a valid email or not, and if they’ve never seen your address before, they’ll mark it as fake. That was the hardest part of using my own email server at the beginning, getting all these asshole spy networks to recognize me.

Unfortunately, mail is a complex subject. Those folks are generally right. I’ve been doing this awhile, and know what I am doing. My solution will blow the doors off of canned solutions in both performance and lack of false positives. But it is a custom solution and I do not recommend it for most people. I had toyed with the idea of putting a management console on the thing, but for the effort involved, I didn’t feel it is worth it these days with barracuda and proxmox mail gateway products out there.

One big item to deal with if you self host these days is to be on IP address space that is not blacklisted by most spam filters. Comcast’s non-business IP space, for example. Linode for another. If you are in this situation, you can relay through a third party, but you are then not controlling things end to end.

Another issue now is that many recipient providers are requiring valid dmarc, dkim, and spf records. You will need to have all three properly configured for the domains that you manage.

What you might want to do, though, is perhaps host your own mail security relays that stand in front of your ‘ready to go’ mail provider of choice. This is much slower than mine, but is what I would use if standing something up for a company these days: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway/overview

Or if you want to host everything yourself, there are some solutions out there so you no longer need to piece it together. Search for ‘self hosted email’. I would still put a mail gateway like proxmox in front of it for your edge security and filtering though.

sendmail, mimedefang, spamassassin, dovecot, sieve, radicale

I should think so, though honestly I have not gotten any spam from protonmail/tutanota ever since I switched over from gmail years back and I’ve only gotten emails that’s I’ve signed up to or that I know are relevant to me aka important emails.

Services like gmail survive by spying on your emails in relation to also having ads on their services, hence why you get so many emails and junk you don’t remember signing up on the promotions tab, despite gmail is supposed to be well renowned for “anti-spam” whilst also not being totally private whatsoever cuz of it. It’s all just a cover tbh esp with top free mail providers.

The points that sold me:

• EU-based (Germany)
• anonymous payment options available (you can mail cash or use monero if this matters to you)
• Caldav for contacts, tasks and calendar