If you do go down the self-hosted mail route I’d be interested to hear about how you implement it. @zeeclor’s DMS recommendation looks useful, and I’m curious about any other “mail in a box” type projects too (which is where I’ll incorrectly file ISPConfig for the purposes of this discussion).
Occasionally I find it’s handy to spin up a mail server on a separate domain to test something. The latest occasion was only earlier this week, where it would have been useful to have access to an IMAP mailbox to test inbound mail while messing about with n8n. Setting up an IMAP server was way out of scope that morning so I only messed about with the sending side of things. A proof of concept of @jdownie’s LLM-via-email was one of the things that crossed my mind, but without an IMAP server it was a non starter. I also was involved in a project during the latter half of 2024 that ran for a several months and received a lot of transactional type email, where I used a separate [disposable] domain name and server. Again, having a standard mail setup ready to pull off the shelf for those kind of things would be very useful.
Not going to move my (and the family’s) email off to a self-hosted setup, but I’ve talked myself into looking more into DMS and other ways to self-host as it would be handy to have something separate sitting there ready to use. More to add to my HLB Homework list! I’m interested to hear which route you end up going down and which software you use in your implementation, @mcrilly.