Recently, there has been a lot of talk in my blog bubble about email self-hosting again (here is one example, here is a second one). I myself switched to a self-hosted mail server over a year ago, only to switch back to a hosted version a few months later.

For me there were no technical problems running Mailcow, I was even quite happy with my setup. Nevertheless I switched because I realized that email is a topic where it’s not really worth hosting it myself. Neither is it much cheaper, nor does it bring me many other advantages. Both Fastmail in the past and the Hosted Mailcow, where I have my emails now, are completely sufficient for my needs.

I don’t have to take care of anything myself and just have to make sure that the monthly automatic money withdrawal works successfully. No more updates, no more worries about my server suddenly going down and the backups not working. Someone else with probably more knowledge will take care of it now. And by having my emails hosted by the developer of the open source project mailcow, I support that others still have the easy possibility to host their emails themselves. And of course my emails are stored on a server in Germany and I use my own domains to send and receive emails.