Personally I found that doing half-and-half works best for me. I put half of my email domains on an email provider for family use and for businesses that might block a self hosted server. I put the other half on a few self hosted mail servers for friends that do the same so that we have higher attachment size limits and as much storage as we have on our servers. The self hosted servers are great for exchanging PGP keys for use in Thunderbird and keeps the meta-data off servers at higher risk of mass-data-collection because of a few bad apples.

There’s a reason I just used Proton’s service: a combination of making sure you configure it right, trust of IPs where major providers will treat your mail as spam despite DKIM/DMARC/SPF being good if you run it yourself and it’s the “wrong” place, and all the other headaches that can come with the territory.

It’s one more reason it feels like the “open” Internet is dying and it’s sad.