I’m pretty far into the degoogling process, and I’m thinking about purchasing a domain and using it for email. I realized I don’t want to be stuck with any one email service, so this is pretty much a necessity for me.
I wouldn’t self host though, because I understand that’s very hard to do.
For people who have already done this: are there any pitfalls or things I should take into consideration before I purchase a domain?
Also, does the tld matter? Are my emails more likely to be sent to spam with a custom domain vs an email provider’s?
You can run a mail server on Raspberry Pi, but you’ll also likely need a Dynamic DNS solution, a paid DNS provider (costs about $15 per year), and to learn a lot a out DKIM, DMARC and SPF, which there are lots of good free guides for.
I ran my own Dynamic DNS to my home for years even without the “dynamic” bit. I just updated it manually once every 18 months when my home IP actually changed. Your mileage may vary, but there’s tons of free and cheap solutions that are plenty good enough.
DNS can be dirt cheap if you’re using AWS or GCP. It might have some privacy implication though, but I don’t believe it have much.
A dynamic dns isn’t needed if you have a domain. There are automatic scripts that work with the Cloudflare API to update your domain’s IP address
Those scripts are generally also just called “Dynamic DNS”.
To clarify for others reading along - web services will try to sell you “Dynamic DNS”, which is something you can also automate for yourself, for free, via many cloud APIs.
Edit: I also see Dynic DNS (as a cloud service that still typically requires running a local script) provided as a free add-on to other services pretty frequently.