I’ve been running my own email server for 15+ years. One year ago I needed to change VPS providers and thus get a totally different IP. I worried about this a bit, but actually had no issues whatsoever. Of course, I wasn’t starting completely from scratch as I had the same domain, all my personal experience, and a battle-tested configuration for docker-mailserver. But yeah, the lack of IP reputation itself didn’t seem to be an issue at all. Maybe I got lucky. Or maybe it’s because I chose a relatively small Canadian VPS provider rather than one of the global cloud giants (I assume their IP address space gets pretty trashed with scammers).

Oh this is one to watch! Thanks for posting. I’m currently running docker-mailserver (which is quite mature and stable) but xmox looks very interesting.

All MTAs have retries baked in, so running a self-hosted email server that receives mail is actually one of the most forgiving services in this respect. If your server is offline, the sending server will retry several times over 24-48 hours before it gives up. Even the big cloud email providers will do this.

That said, there are other aspects of running an email server that require some extra rigour, but they’re more on the sending side (making sure emails you send to other people actually land in their inbox). Doable, but one of the more challenging things to self-host.

OpenProject is what you’re looking for.

I don’t have a big problem with CloudFlare (and use their service myself for some things). But so much of the internet infrastructure is already consolidated with them. There are so many good options for domain registrars. Let’s spread things around a bit.