The reason why I host my own email service is that I can have a wildcard address, that no provider (that I know) offers. So that I can use whatever address@mydomain that I want, without creating an alias in the mail server.
For this reason I can have a different address for each service that I register with, for example facebook@domain, and thus easily block services that start spamming out, and even know if a service leaks my address without authorization.
Yes, I know that GMail has a similar feature (by using address+whatever@gmail.com) but some sites blocks it, and still you don't have that ability to have a completely different address, that if one day you want can become its own mailbox.
Another reason is that commercial email services started blocking the simple SMTP/IMAP authentication with username/password, making it difficult, if not impossible, to configure a server them to send email trough GMail or Outlook, or a service to subscribe trough IMAP subscription to the mailbox to trigger an action when a mail arrives. Proton even decided not to support plain SMTP/IMAP, and you need a bridge to use it!
All my systems, being them servers or services that run on them, are configured to send the email trough my server, and the configuration is super easy. So that, for example, I'm notified if a cron job fails (basically the mail to the local Linux users gets routed to my server) or I have my Home Assistant installation notify me trough email.
Next I manage different domains, and I can have all that domains in a single central mail server. That allows to manage the mail of different systems in a central place, and with a single account. As far as I know this is not possible with commercial services: what you can do is of course to have one system forward the mail to another, but to send the mail as another domain with the same mailbox? With my mailserver I can, I just configure multipe FROM addresses in Thunderbird.
Finally on my server I don't have a limit on the number of accounts/mailbox, so I create an account/mailbox for whatever reason I want in two seconds, for a fixed montly cost (of around 10 euros, since I use the smallest AWS EC2 that they have available)
As you see, there are plenty of reasons to have your own mail service.
And, and let's conclude with: I've lost more mails thanks to antispam in commercial email software such as Outlook or GMail, that on my own server. I don't care about spam, I (if needed) know how to filter it out client-side. I don't want systems to refuse or even hide messages to me, something GMail and Outlook does.
For this reason I can have a different address for each service that I register with, for example facebook@domain, and thus easily block services that start spamming out, and even know if a service leaks my address without authorization.
Yes, I know that GMail has a similar feature (by using address+whatever@gmail.com) but some sites blocks it, and still you don't have that ability to have a completely different address, that if one day you want can become its own mailbox.
Another reason is that commercial email services started blocking the simple SMTP/IMAP authentication with username/password, making it difficult, if not impossible, to configure a server them to send email trough GMail or Outlook, or a service to subscribe trough IMAP subscription to the mailbox to trigger an action when a mail arrives. Proton even decided not to support plain SMTP/IMAP, and you need a bridge to use it!
All my systems, being them servers or services that run on them, are configured to send the email trough my server, and the configuration is super easy. So that, for example, I'm notified if a cron job fails (basically the mail to the local Linux users gets routed to my server) or I have my Home Assistant installation notify me trough email.
Next I manage different domains, and I can have all that domains in a single central mail server. That allows to manage the mail of different systems in a central place, and with a single account. As far as I know this is not possible with commercial services: what you can do is of course to have one system forward the mail to another, but to send the mail as another domain with the same mailbox? With my mailserver I can, I just configure multipe FROM addresses in Thunderbird.
Finally on my server I don't have a limit on the number of accounts/mailbox, so I create an account/mailbox for whatever reason I want in two seconds, for a fixed montly cost (of around 10 euros, since I use the smallest AWS EC2 that they have available)
As you see, there are plenty of reasons to have your own mail service.
And, and let's conclude with: I've lost more mails thanks to antispam in commercial email software such as Outlook or GMail, that on my own server. I don't care about spam, I (if needed) know how to filter it out client-side. I don't want systems to refuse or even hide messages to me, something GMail and Outlook does.