It has long been a priority of mine to migrate my email addresses to my own domain name. My reasons for doing this are quite numerous:

1. Email is probably our most intimate form of communication, and I am growing increasingly uncomfortable about using external services like Gmail to host it.

2. Email has become extremely centralized, which can be dangerous for a standardized protocol. If a single entity has too much influence over important web standards, it enables them to manipulate said standards for their own benefit, potentially to the detriment of the public at large (see 1).

3. I am growing increasingly concerned about email providers imposing onerous requirements on setting up and accessing email accounts. Such requirements can include requiring users to provide a phone number, evaluate CAPTCHAs, or run non-free javascript.

4. Internet giants (most notably Cloudflare) have been developing a reputation for being hostile to users who use technologies that enhance their privacy such as VPNs, Tor, anti-fingerprinting techniques, and others.

5. Different providers may offer features with standard email providers do not. I'll detail some of the benefits of this setup further below.

6. Having email on your own domain simply looks very cool.

However, setting up and managing an email server is not for the faint of heart. Some drawbacks include:

1. A misconfigured server can result in your domain being placed on a spam blacklist, and it can be extremely difficult to get off of these lists. If your domain ends up on one of these lists, messages that are sent to other users may never reach their inboxes.

2. The server of course needs to be regularly updated with patches, and the domain must also not be allowed to expire. If a user's critical accounts are registered with said email address and the domain expires, a hacker could gain access to these accounts by registering the domain on their own, and then setting up their own mail server and triggering the password resets.

In the next post, I'll explain the setup that I chose and how I implemented it. It turned out to be a very easy process!