Selfhosted

Not worth the hassle - best compromise is to get your own domain but use a provider like fastmail to host it.

If they turn sour you can move your domain to another mail host.

Yes, I still run my own email server. It is not for the faint of heart, but once it's configured and your IP reputation is clean, it's mostly smooth sailing. I have not had any deliverability problems to date, initial setup/learning period notwithstanding.

If you're not scared away yet, here are some specific challenges you'll face:

• SMTP ports are typically blocked by many providers as a spam prevention measure. Hosting on a residential connection is often a complete non-starter and is becoming more difficult on business class connections as well (at least in the US, anyway).
• If you plan to host in a VPS, good luck getting a clean IPv4 address. Most are on one or more public blacklists and likely several company-specific ones (cough Microsoft cough). I spent about 2 weeks getting my new VPS's IP reputation cleaned up before I migrated from the old VPS.
• Uptime: You need to have a reliable hosting solution with minimal power/server/network downtime.
• Learning Curve: Email is not just one technology; it's several that work together. So in a very basic email server, you will have Postfix as your MTA, Dovecot as your MDA, some kind of spam detection and filtering (e.g. SpamAssassin), some kind of antivirus to scan messages/attachments (e.g. Clamd), message signing (DKIM), user administration/management, webmail, etc. You'll need to get all of these configured and operating in harmony.
• Spam prevention standards: You'll need to know how to work with DNS and create/manage all of the appropriate records on your domain (MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM records, etc). All of these are pretty much required in 2023 in order for messages from your server to reach your recipient.
• Keeping your IP reputation clean: This is an ongoing challenge if you host for a lot of people. It can only take one or two compromised accounts to send a LOT of spam and land your IP/IP block on a blacklist.
• Keeping up with new standards: When I set my mail server up, DMARC and DKIM weren't required by most recipient servers. Around 2016, I had to bolt on OpenDKIM to my email stack otherwise my messages ended up in the recipient's spam folder. -Contingency Plan: One day you may just wake up and decide it's too much to keep managing your own email server. I'm not there yet, but I've already got a plan in place to let a bigger player take over when the time comes.

I've been self-hosting e-mail for over 15 years and hope to continue doing so. Although it's being made increasingly difficult by big tech players. I wrote about it here: https://proycon.anaproy.nl/posts/rant-against-centralising-e-mail/

Obligatory PSA: ProtonMail isn't any more secure than Gmail and is likely a honeypot scheme crafted by government agencies: https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/

I know the title of that sounds clickbaity, but they cite their sources. It's worth the read for those curious about ProtonMail's history and their CEOs.

Despite my willingness to self-host almost everything, e-mail remains the last frontier for me. Keeping abreast of standards, keeping up today, avoiding implications in abuse and many, many smaller issues abound ... and that's despite my fixed IP and ISP willing to set up a reverse-DNS for me.

Instead I've gone with a paid email provider that I'm REALLY happy with.

I want to do a setup where i use mailcow at home for receiving emails but Amazon ses SMTP for sending, it's possible? Looks like it is, but i didn't investigate it

I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.

I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)

I do host my own mailserver for multiple years now without any issues.

I'm using https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/ on a rented server, not at home. I recently added DKIM and I check my setup via https://mxtoolbox.com and the like in irregular intervals to see if I can improve something.

The only downside I see is spam filtering, which obviously works better with GMail if the whole world population does the filtering for you. But the included SpamAssassin setup does work and catches most of the spam. I do check for false positives/negatives very regularly and have training folders set up so I can easily move messages into the SA training.

Only people who hate themselves

I run my own Mailserver on a vps with mailcow dockerized. Was a real pain to set up, even through it mostly works right now.

DNS stuff isn't just some A or AAAA records, also txt stuff reverse DNS and much more. As the others said, that's completely impossible with a regular ISP.

I'm on some dumb blacklist because my IP is obviously in the IP range of my hosting provider, and some lists generally block all vps ranges.

Now imagine the following: your bank wants to contact you and your primary mail is selfhosted, for some reason they block your IP (yes outgoing blocks, those idiots) and you don't get some real important mail. Or your server is down for maintenance, certificate issues, so on.

The best solution is most probably letting a professional email holster take care of your domain, for email at least. Protonmail offers that but the problem I have with them is that they don't allow a regular login through thunderbird, restricted to their own software.