You are totally misjudging this! Honestly you are probably just thinking about the absolute nightmare of manually configuring every single little thing like SMTP and SPF back in the day which was a massive headache. But that is not how it works anymore. I have been self hosting my email for over ten years using mail in a box and it is basically zero maintenance once it is up and running. These modern stacks use abstraction layers to handle all the annoying stuff so you do not have to be a full time sysadmin just to get through the day. It is not some impossible task where you are stuck with Tuta or Proton because you can definitely escape those silos if you use the right stack instead of trying to build every single layer from scratch.
It still requires you to maintain the entire server infrastructure. Sure if you already have your server up and running either way then spinning up another docker container or whatever else you use is pretty fast to do. But building and, more importantly, properly securing a server stack just for mail is a lot of work for little benefit. And if it stops working for whatever reason you won’t even notice it since Emails just get send into the void and are forever lost there.
If you really want to go the extra mile to be more independent from big services, then buying a domain and using that with something like tuta is enough. You can still jump ship whenever you like without the workload of server maintenance.
You are totally misjudging this! Honestly you are probably just thinking about the absolute nightmare of manually configuring every single little thing like SMTP and SPF back in the day which was a massive headache. But that is not how it works anymore. I have been self hosting my email for over ten years using mail in a box and it is basically zero maintenance once it is up and running. These modern stacks use abstraction layers to handle all the annoying stuff so you do not have to be a full time sysadmin just to get through the day. It is not some impossible task where you are stuck with Tuta or Proton because you can definitely escape those silos if you use the right stack instead of trying to build every single layer from scratch.
It still requires you to maintain the entire server infrastructure. Sure if you already have your server up and running either way then spinning up another docker container or whatever else you use is pretty fast to do. But building and, more importantly, properly securing a server stack just for mail is a lot of work for little benefit. And if it stops working for whatever reason you won’t even notice it since Emails just get send into the void and are forever lost there.
If you really want to go the extra mile to be more independent from big services, then buying a domain and using that with something like tuta is enough. You can still jump ship whenever you like without the workload of server maintenance.