If you are interested in switching from Gmail to EU provider and were hesitating because you weren’t sure how to approach it this post is just for you!
I am describing my path where I switched to Soverin email provider and talking some details about desktop and mobile clients.
Soverin is EU based provider with servers in Europe, high privacy and years of experience.
Whole post here: EU made email
For self-hosted, I’ve heard round cube is nice. We use it at work. It’s okay. Web client is ugly last time I checked, but everyone has their clients, so there’s no real difference to any other email provider, except the company controls it entirely.
I’d deploy Round Cube for myself and family, but I have very little motivation to do so. I email some internet people very infrequently, and that’s pretty much it. Some services send me emails, but they are mostly spam, I created a separate email for people (and I have like one email a week at best), and I really don’t care about that other email for spam. So, I don’t know, I don’t feel any real need to self-host.
Roundcube is the webmail client (IMAP client) component of selfhosting an email server. You could use it together with postfix (SMTP Server) and dovecot (IMAP and POP3 server) to put together a simple mailstack. Use opendkim and opendmarc to improve your deliverability and make it harder to impersonate your mail domain. Add spamassassin to get rid of some spam.
Another option is to look into mailcow or mailinabox, they deliver a completed package built around the above.
Do everything right and still see google and microsoft send you straight to spam because you don’t have enough email traffic to be considered legitimate (or important) enough to care about.