One year of running my own mail server

Everyone says running your own mail server is madness. A year ago I did it anyway, for one domain and a handful of addresses. Report card, twelve months later.

Deliverability: fine. SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured on day one, and I send so little mail that every big provider treats me as a low-volume, low-reputation sender that behaves. I probe weekly; it lands in the inbox every time.

Workload: maybe twenty minutes a month. Most of it is watching the log for backscatter and keeping the blocklist thresholds sane. Rspamd's default configuration did the heavy lifting.

What actually broke

Once: a certificate renewal hook that did not reload Postfix, so clients started seeing the stale cert. Once: a disk full incident caused by logs, not mail. Both boring, both fixed in minutes, both now covered by alerts.

Would I recommend it? If you like owning your inbox and you can accept a small recurring tax of attention, yes. If you need zero-maintenance, use a provider. There is no shame in that.