I have one of these and it’s awesome.

Some things you might face:

• Residential IP blocks from your ISP
• Port 25 is often blocked by ISPs and cloud providers
• Big email providers immediately distrust small email servers; Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo will silently block and move the emails to junk
• You have a multitude of DNS records and they have to be perfect. They’re also fiddly. DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS. One blip and email ain’t working
• If your security is crap, your server can get turned into a spam cannon and it can take weeks to months to get removed from blacklists
• Managing your own spam filters sucks
• Troubleshooting deliverability can be a nightmare

This is a good way to get blacklisted by email providers. Not discouraging it but your mileage will vary greatly on this endeavor.

My ISP gave me an Eero device when we upgraded our internet. I got rid of that shit ASAP. There’s no reason for a cloud provider to have visibility into my LAN and the thought of that makes me feel ill.

As someone that uses AI at work because 1. this is a run-out-the-clock situation, and 2. I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible, it feels weird and hypocritical to expect no AI in all of the software around me as well.

With that said, if I still had any semblance of passion for writing code, which I do not, anything I worked on for the OSS community would be fully devoid of AI usage. But I’m mentally at a point where I’d rather move to a cabin and use computers less and less with each passing day.