Thanks for this thread, I have exactly the same use-case, but I have not yet had the time to actually research too deep into it so I am unfortunately still relying on Google.
My partial conclusions:
- I’ve been using the AnonAddy approach for 20 years now with my own domain, like many others have. You do not actually need a full suite for this, just setup your incoming email on your domain with a wildcard, choose a unique email address for everything you sign up for, and that is it. Sidenote: You’ll be amazed at the confused faces you get when “Joe Plumbing Co” requests your email address and you reply "[email protected]".
- For outgoing mail, just use SMTP2GO on the free tier, it works fine and I’ve never had delivery problems. Ignore everyone that talks about IP reputation making it impossible to self-host, while it is true, there are several suppliers with a free tier or a very low cost that take care of this for you. I use it nowadays with Thunderbird because for some reason I was unable to properly use custom aliases with the Google SMTP server.
- For incoming mail, you will probably need a better plan than self-hosting. Your server needs to be up 24/7 or you will end up losing email, so it is probably better to have a cloud-based incoming server that holds it and forwards to your server when it actually becomes available. I’m still investigating this part but it would seem that Cloudflare Mail Routing should work.
I have not yet found what the best solution is to the self-hosted archival search problem, please share your findings!
This. I’ve done this since 2003 (when I got my first custom domain + email) and I’ve discovered several forums, services and companies that have either sold their databases or (most probably) got hacked and never made it public.
Pro-tip: If you are going to give out the address face to face, they might not trust you or not understand when you tell them that your email address is [email protected]. I even had a store blatantly refusing to type that into their system. So, I started using ROT-13 to encode the company/service name, and just telling them the address is [email protected]. Nobody has ever asked why my email address was so unpronounceable.