I'm afraid I don't have the desire/bandwith to manage this myself. I just want something more reliable than google. maybe I should just go back to school to rely on the university.
Opening any port on your server is asking for intrusion attempts. You will get a constant stream of them, and they will all fail, unless you do something really dumb. Fail2ban is probably a good idea.
I've recently started using protonmail myself. It's not (yet) my main email, but I haven't had any problems with it so far. The free tier has some limits, like on emails sent per day, size of inbox, number of email filters you can have, etc. If I were actually going to use it as my personal email I'd go for the paid tier, about 5 dollars a month I think.
We've used ProtonMail for two years on the Visionary (largest) plan with multiple custom domains and super tight security settings that no regular mailbox can offer. I'd definitely recommend it.
Protonmail. Emails are end-to-end encrypted at rest so sysadmins and others can’t access them. Fastmail is also a good provider, but you won’t get the same peace of mind as protonmail.
