  > I’m honestly curious, what’s the point of a personal mail server nowadays?

There's a large number of cool things possible, my favorite is having a catch-all domain (or multiple). Most of the time when you buy mail hosting from your domain registrar for example, you pay by mailbox. Same goes for the majority of mail hosters in general.

With a catch-all domain, you can email <anything>@example.org, and I will get it. I don't have to first generate some addy.io or simplelogin.io or Firefox Relay alias; I can simply enter <company name>@example.org or <service>@example.org when registering on a website, hell I do that even on physical (paper) forms.

Later on, I can decide to add an alias with special configuration, e.g.: email arrives at <tax department>@example.org? → Route to "High importance" mailbox; I receive a Newsletter from a company I never heard of → <company name>@example.org sold my email address (and they can't strip the marker off, which they easily could with the +suffix).

  > Isn’t it the case that today they have two huge disadvantages:
  > 1. Being plagued by spam,

I do not remember having received a single spam email in the last months. In fact, I just looked up the stats: My personal (non-business, non-work) inbox in Thunderbird reaches back to about 2024-03-14, with about 2500 elements.

My spam folder currently contains 0 elements.

And I don't even have any advanced spam filtering or reputation blacklists or anything similar setup.

  > 2. Being considered spam by major mail services (where most of one’s recipients will usually reside)?

I actually tried this out some months ago with an "email placement tester": I can comfortably reach Gmail & Google Workspace, Hotmail/Office 365/Exchange, and a few others that were tested that I forgot about.

I do not remember mails of mine not reaching their intended receiver very often - while this might happen once a year (that you send an email and one second after get a "your message could not be delivered" response), I actually hear about this more often from peers using the largest email provider in the DACH region (GMX), so apparently I rank better? It's usually a misconfiguration from the receiver setting up some scam DNS blocklist (e.g. UCEPROTECT). Wouldn't call this a problem of the mail server though, and as I said, even some rather large (commercial) providers have the same issue.

Generally speaking, if you do things right, email will go well for you - this "doing things right" has simply for a long time been quite hard (when postfix/dovecot was prevalent where you need n-number of different third-party software packages, e.g. OpenDMARC). Nowadays, with the modern mail servers available, like Mox (or Stalwart, or Maddy) doing "things right" is very simple: Choose an hoster/ISP with good IP reputation (e.g. check with https://multirbl.valli.org/ if they are on any blocklists), setup your (modern) mailserver, and you're golden.

And this will come with a nice number of advantages:

- you have your own domain, so you're portable

- you control and are able to customize your email infrastructure (how many mailboxes do I want for my use cases, how would I like different aliases to be mapped to them, catch-all/wildcard, applying scripts on these mailboxes, etc)

- privacy/security: Your email (which I consider deeply core to the modern internet infrastructure and ones digital identity (due to controlling the login to basically all websites)) lives on your infrastructure, and no-one but you can access them

- selfhosting is fun, and one gains lots of knowledge about inner workings of the internet with it