Re:Going through this also (Score 2)

Like you and many others, I too am going through the same thing. I've had a domain on the free G Suite for years that I've got many family members emails on. I also have a subdomain on a different free G Suite instance where the same family members also have email addresses with MANY aliases, so that we can where desired use a almost-throw-away email address to sign up for web services.

I've decided that since Google is moving to charging us, to take away both domains and to "self host" my email. But not being keen to jump into having to be actually administer a critical service that I've heard can be considerable ongoing work, I'm delegating the management of keeping our email IP "clean" from the perspective of the big email providers and have put in an order for The Helm personal email server.

I have the impression that The Helm gets a lot of disrespect from a lot of techies, probably due to them supplying and charging for what you could certainly do yourself for "free". If you're unfamiliar, The Helm is a company that will sell you a little raspberry pi like piece of hardware (although with some extra niceties such as a secure enclave chip) at admittedly what seems like quite an inflated price ($350 or so) for the hardware plus then charges you $100 / year for ongoing service. What does that get us? First, unlimited email addresses on an unlimited number of domains. How? The box runs DoveCot as an email service (and SpamAssassin for spam), as well as offers VPN service and NextCloud. They manage pushing updates to the box to keep the software secure. But they also (which is kind of where the attractiveness of this comes in for me) include a "clean" IP address from AWS through which all email services from your box (ran out of your home) are proxied. They also pay for S3 storage where your emails and other data are backed up.

Like all "self hosted out of your own home" options, if your internet goes down, your email is down. But I don't know about you, but my internet connection to my house the last few years has been certainly reliable enough that hosting out of my own house seems reasonable. The the cost of it for having the email setup managed (or maybe better said "administered") by a professional full-time administrator, plus the privacy of the technology they use plus having the data in my own house, makes me feel comfortable paying a company that puts our privacy in high regard.

Admittedly, I am not yet actually running this since the back-order to get the device is a few months long (I'm supposedly getting it late May according to the company), but just thought I should throw in here since I hadn't yet seen anybody else mention this option.