I also self-host, and it's not nearly as difficult as know-it-all people on the Internet make it out to be. I rolled things out from scratch using Postfix and Dovecot on Debian as I dislike bloated and opaque containers that hide important decisions from the sysadmin. The main requirements are a clean, fixed IPv4 and an aged domain.

Absolutely zero maintenance has been required since I set it up (unattended upgrades), until recently when Dovecot updated the configuration syntax. Claude ported the config script to the new syntax in about 2min.