You can have the best of both worlds with self-hosting received mail and achieving good deliverability by using a service such as Amazon SES. SES will probably cost you less than $10 a year for personal email sending volumes. I use it for my business and it is less than $15/yr. Rarely get a bill for more than $1. They hold you accountable for any abuse/complaints, which is a good thing.
I use it for personal use, would also recommend. It's not 'self-hosting' of course, but that's not what I actually care about personally, more interested in 'running my own' regardless of whether it's physically my hardware or not.
(Or rather given everything I've read about self-hosting email, not regardless, this is my preference...)
For a private mail server operator, Amazon SES is somewhat annoying because if your mail server is down, they're only keeping mails in the delivery queue for something like eight hours or so, which is way too short if you're not a big provider who can commit to round-the-clock support for the mail server.
How do you use SES for this? It seems to only allow receipt of email conveniently. Sending seems to require using an api which is not something most people want to do to email others.
