Yes, I admit that the subconscious fear for a future totalitarian, fascist regime was a factor in deciding to learn to run my own mailserver many years ago. Now, 20 years later, that mailserver is still running, is up2date and one of the things I am really glad to have. I documented the latest update round in a blog series starting at https://jan.wildeboer.net/2022/08/Email-0-The-Journey-2022/
E-Mail Done My Way, Part 0 - The journey

Warning. This whole series is not a simple HOWTO. This series is about how I run my mail server. I go through the configuration, line by line and explain. It’s not going to be a simple Copy/Paste to run your own mail server. You have been warned.

Jan Wildeboer's Blog
Being able to run my own mailserver is the result of #OpenStandards and many, many developers publishing the needed parts under Free Software and open source licenses and keeping these packages updated over many, many years. I am very grateful for that. Without the people behind postfix, dovecot, opendkim and many other moving parts this would not be possible.
And now that I have my own #Forgejo instance running and have switched all my websites to static pages, I will also serve these websites from my 2 public servers next year. As they are static pages, I can switch hosting around very fast und completely under my control. Digital Sovereignty starts with the individual :)
@jwildeboer where do you run your infra?
@jwildeboer But are you able to send to GMail and Hotmail/MS Outlook online servers (now wel over 50% of accounts seem to go through there). MS and Google seem hell bent on forcing all small mail servers out with opaque DNSSec and DMARK demands that only work part of the time even if you stringently follow their published rules.
I've seen lots of long-time self email hosters give up due to "embrace, extend, extinguish" on the email protocols.

@jwildeboer Normally I use Postfix as an MTA. It is created by Wietse Venema.

I joined a BSD user group over video conf and noticed that Wietse Venema was a regular member of the BSD user group.

I couldn't tell you what the BSD user group meeting was about because I spent the whole time amazed that I was in the same video conf wiith Wietse Venema.

Honestl;y I would do the same with Eric Allman. Don't care for djb or his software.

Love running mail servers . Found that out back in '97.

@jwildeboer πŸ‘ I'm similarly thankful to the contributors of Haraka. It was very easy to deploy SMTP/MX at scale with custom logic (Redis, delivery to apps) from containers.

Is Postfix any better at having multiple instances sharing a single queue volume?

https://github.com/haraka/Haraka

GitHub - haraka/Haraka: A fast, highly extensible, and event driven SMTP server

A fast, highly extensible, and event driven SMTP server - haraka/Haraka

GitHub

@jeff @jwildeboer I’ve long been involved with ChamSocial.com, where a community site (in react) shares back end and classes with a mailing list system built on Haraka. The idea of running apps inside a mail server context still seems bonkers!

https://github.com/chamsocial

Chamsocial

Chamsocial has 3 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

GitHub
@jwildeboer thing is: having a secure communication can never be an individual effort. your communication is now as safe as the infrastructure of your least safest peer.