I never thought I would be in the 'roll your own' camp, I have been addicted to Gmail/Yahoo! for quite a few years for my own personal use. I also know the orthodox view that running your own server takes too much time, forever needs updates and such like.<p>However, I recently did build an email server and it works a treat. The enormous complexity and the lack of a decent guide was a problem, plus there is a lot to know. Fortunately I did know a bit about PTR/SPF/DKIM and so on and so forth, but I don't think things like Postfix (even if you use them) are fathomable. For me the trick was to get it to work, as in send/receive mail, then to work on making sure the delivery works without stuff going down some black hole.<p>I have not bothered with a webmail frontend, e.g. Roundcube (which has been updated) as, in my experience, webmail frontends can get character sets mangled etc. I am using the normal email on my phone plus normal 'Thunderbird'.<p>I have not had some sea of spam or hackers wanting to do nasty things. Now it just works and my build can survive a few apt-get type upgrades, reboots and resource problems (the kernel hasn't killed the mail server things).<p>I built my mail server because I wanted to read email with code and that is kind of dependent on having your own email server if you are doing lots of developer things and you don't want to be mysteriously barred from some service you have no control over.<p>There are no limits on what I can do with my own box, if I want emails from domains x + y to go to one particular box, or accounts Alice and Bob to go through to Cheryl's account then I could do that with some extensive manual reading and a huge amount of time lost getting it to work. I would probably lose that time anyway doing it the Microsoft Way, but, at least I won't hit a wall of impossibility.<p>As mentioned I have changed from 'don't roll your own' because it is allegedly about as silly as reinventing the wheel, to seeing 'roll your own' as important to do and not as hard as people imagine. Clearly things might be different if I had fifty or so people wanting calendars and what not, I would go for a hosted, paid for thing under those circumstances out of cowardliness and not wanting to be blamed when it went wrong.<p>I must say that email is surprisingly hard once you get to the nuts and bolts of it. Email clients and webmail services do a lot of stuff to present a straightforward, easy to use interface. However, conceptually, I don't believe email needs to be hard.