I started hosting my email at home some months ago and it works great. However, my ISP blocks some ports necessary for running a mailserver (incoming SMTP), so I have to use an SMTP relay (which is on a VPS and does port 25 to some other port that is not blocked). Additionally, to not worry about deliverability, I let my mailserver send all outgoing mail through another service. The additional costs for this are about 2€/month.

I use Stalwart as a mail server and it was not too hard to setup (with some caveats to get it working with my SSL certs behind a reverse proxy. But nothing a bit of LLM chatting couldn't solve). All in all, it's not 100% self hosted, but works well.

However, I don't agree with the suggestion in the article to use a self hosted LLM. My mailserver needs a few hundred MBs of RAM at max, but with the spam filter this would increase like 10x-100x.