I don't understand this thing about encrypting stored email if the other person receives it or saves a copy in the clear. Most of the time, the other person is on gmail, so there is a plaintext copy of your email on a google server, and everything that implies.<p>The two big hassles of self-hosting email are incoming spam on the receiving side, and deliverability issues on the sending due to very aggressive antispam measures at the big email providers. Hosted email services' product is basically continuous maintenance of spam filtering on the receiving side, and e.g. building IP reputation and retrying failed deliveries through a clean IP pool on the sending side. Merely running an IMAP or SMTP server without these efforts is comparatively easy.<p>So it seems to me sufficient to use a privacy-conscious hosted provider for filtering and SMTP but not for storage, and handle storage yourself. I'm currently not doing that due to laziness but it seems like a proper and feasible thing to do. There isn't much point going overboard when the traffic is general purpose email, where the weakest link will usually be at the other person's end (and out of your control) rather than at your end.