I have been hosting my own email using mailinabox. The tool is so painless I suggest more people should use it. The only ongoing maintenance I have had to manage is rebooting it to apply updates. The whole thing is backed up with a built in backup tool that rsyncs the data to my home server.
The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
mailinabox seems to be a 'magic script' of sorts, which ones can read through, but it seems to wave a wand and things should Just Work. ISPmail appears to be more of a set of instructions of what to run manually to reach the end goal.
How hard is it to understand what mailinabox does after running the script?
Mailinabox is very much automatic. You run an install script and it asks you for a hostname and domain and thats about it. It also manages updating, backups, certificates all for you.
I don't really know how it works but I have been running it for 2 years and it has been fine. The hardest thing was updating to the new ubuntu LTS which involved making sure my backups were safe, wiping the vps and then restoring the backup on a fresh ubuntu install.
Because the software is strict on using only a fresh ubuntu install with nothing else on it, it all just works because you have the same config as everyone else.
Its not really then end of the world. It just means I need to unsubscribe from newsletters manually rather than letting google dump them in the trash automatically. I would like to see server side email filtering though since my thunderbird filters are useless when my desktop is off and I check with my phone.
I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
Yeah this is an interesting side effect: I just use the recommended defaults in spamassassin with my self-hosted mail server and it does a much better job than gmail of properly sorting mail between inbox and spam folders.
Mailinabox configures everything in the way gmail likes. Unless you start your vps on a tainted IP address it should be no problem. I send to gmail and outlook emails fine.
Depends on your hosting provider with Outlook still right? I run a mail server on Linode and I had thought that Microsoft was still blocking all their IPs.
The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.