I’ve made a couple attempts at this so far.
The software I’ve been looking at is:
I didn’t really give Cyrus a good go because I got Stalwart in a spot where I could receive messages through IMAP.
I didn’t get far at all with sending messages. Oracle is my currently cloud provider and port 25 is blocked on my account.
The feature that drew me to both of these projects is JMAP support. I heard about it while talking to a few people at a recent Philly JS meetup.
I think right now, the novelty of a new protocol is what makes me want to set up an email server. The other reason I want to host it myself is to be able to host email for friends and family - though no one has approached me about wanting a service like this.
The only scary part for me right now is that I don’t know what it would take to provide a stable service. But maybe that’s not something I really need to think about. If my email goes down, I probably have other things I need to be worried about.
Anyway, I’ll see how much more time I want to throw at this. I think the most reasonable next step is pay for Fastmail and watch Stalwart develop over the next year and maybe self host in the future.