I was thinking about how to improve my email situation, because at the moment I am using an address of a commercial mail provider, which obviously brings some concerns of lock-in.
While fully self-hosting the email is an option, I am a bit wary of this, because having a working email is very critical and I do trust the commercial providers to give better uptime and reliability than my old server in the closet. Does anyone have experience hosting an email service and what is it like/could you recommend it?
The other option that I am more inclined to is having the email hosted by some cloud provider, but using an address under my personal domain name. The point would be of course that I could change the email provider while keeping the address. Which providers supporting this could you recommend? What is the process like linking a domain to an email host?
If you do not want to (completely) self-host but do want freedom with your custom domain then Migadu is a superb choice, it’s like heaven/nirvana/paradise 🎇 for email admins 😀 https://migadu.com/
And you can technically still do some sort of part-time self host. The very difficult part of self-hosting email these days is the sending part (and the big and smaller tech bros rejecting your emails), not the receiving part. So if you want to learn, you can self host the receiving part, store your email at home or on some rented server and then use Migadu to send your emails out. Migadu has a feature called MX proxy which can be used for this part-time self hosting take.