> You run your own email server on your own VPS and your own domain name, serving yourself and maybe a few family members and close friends.

I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability to/from all destinations.

Your main problem will be that almost certainly whatever VPS host you're on will have "polluted" IP space from previous customers and neighbouring IPs in the same netblocks. It will be something entirely beyond your control and not likely to ever get fixed.

If you want to self host your own email you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month.

Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS, but a minimum of $150-200/mo for colocation services or a dedicated server from a hosting company that has an absolute zero tolerance abuse policy. Or if you happen to know somebody at such an ISP and can work out a friendly deal with them, that might be an option, and would involve much less money.

And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup.

re: what's "wrong" with common open source webmail IMAP clients, neither rainloop or roundcube are terribly offensive or bad. I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use (both of the above are used by some large universities and others), catering to a niche market of people who want to just self-host personal email.

It took me 10 minutes to host an email server and all my emails get delivered just fine.

If you’re worried about deliverability. Just use a relay server to manage deliverability issues , dkim setup for you , like aws ses

Atleast that way youre receiving emails still stay hosted and private on your personal server , and outgoing emails get delivered by ses.

Ses is pretty cheap too, heck its literally free for 2000 emails or so per month, so no extra cost for personal email servers.

https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

Something like this , lets you setup a decent mailserver under 10 mins with next to no maintenance needed.

(Only had to log back in once , to update the docker image itself)