You should selfhost your mail (in 2026)

Summary

If you have spent a few days online in self-hosting or data-sovereignty communities there is one advice that always pops up: You can self-host anything but not your e-mail server! I do understand where they are coming from since there are horror stories around about blocklists and delivery problems but today I want to show you that it is in fact possible in 2026 and you might even be able to host it from home! By design email is an open system and we should not accept that a few big corporations have all our mail and the internet to become less decentralized in the process. Since my small MSP company helps people and corporations on a daily basis to switch from Gmail and Microsoft to cloud alternatives or self-hosted solutions I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and also move away from Google Workspace. At home or on a VPS? The small subset of self-hosters that are willing to self-host their mailserver is again divided between those who dare to host their mailservers at home and those, who will only use a VPS. Usually I'd suggest using a VPS but if your home internet checks these boxes, you can 100% host your own mailserver at home: If you checked all of these, then you are ready to host at home! But what about internet outages? If my modem goes down I'll lose incoming mails, right? Depends on how long your outage is but usually: No! EMails are very robust as in if your mail server is down, the sender will retry to deliver the mail because in the early internet, outages were plentiful. If your internet is down less than 40% on any given day, it will still work fine. What mailserver software should I use? So this depends on your needs really. There are multiple mailserver solutions out there with different ways to host it. A good starting point would be docker-mailserver which is a full mailserver suite deployable via Docker with sane defaults. But there are other solutions out there like: Personally my mail is on my ISPConfig Server which I have mainta...