The easiest way to have control of your email is probably to buy a domain name (such as example.com) and then use this on an account from an independent email provider.

If you're ever unhappy with a provider, you can switch to a different one without changing your email address because the domain still belongs to you.

There are lots of independent email providers, all of them let you use your own domain. For example @Tutanota, @fastmail and @protonmail are very popular.

#GrowYourOwn

@homegrown I see a lot of people who recommend against spinning your own services for email. I'm curious, why? I'm considering setting up a full suite of stuff and having email be part of that.

@CiscoJunkie

Yeah, I was just considering doing a follow-up reply about that! 😁

I asked for advice a while back from people who ran their own email instances, here's what they said:

https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/108555028721713290

(In summary, most felt it wasn't worth the hassle, especially for non-technical people.)

Grow Your Own Services 🌱 (@[email protected])

Does anyone here have experience of running their own email instance? Would you say it is viable for a non-technical individual to run their own email service? Do you have any lessons to pass on? #AskFedi #AskFediverse #AskTheFediverse

social.growyourown.services

@homegrown Ah, much appreciated! I'm reasonably technical, so I'll have to dive into the tradeoffs to see if it's worth it.

I'm also hosting some services on a residential connection at the moment, and I remember a lot of service providers (at least used to) block SMTP outbound. That might ultimately be the determining factor for me.

@CiscoJunkie @homegrown i can only echo what people said there.

i am a technical person, and i am all for self-hosting stuff and a proper decentralized web. but i have a cheap privacy focused email hoster which offers everything i need, and i do absolutely nothing. of course with my own domain on top.

@meisterdieb @CiscoJunkie @homegrown I ran my own mail server for years but gave up many years ago when fighting spam became too much work. And that was before so many servers made it almost impossible for small servers to deliver mail reliably to them.