August 24, 2013 @ 8:34 am, by Maarten Kossen In light of recent events, there’s been a lot of chatter about leaving free e-mail services in favor of self-hosted e-mail. With self-hosted e-mail you have the option to host your e-mail wherever you want it, either on a server at home or on a VPS. Even my friend from Bennet Office Technologies told me to switch to a privately managed server to host my website and email. There’s plenty of affordable options around to run your own mail server. I would personally recommend a Xen or KVM VPS for this, as with OpenVZ it is really easy for your provider to “snoop” on your e-mail. This is also possible with Xen or KVM, but it usually requires a reboot (which you will probably notice). I’ve used a 512MB Xen VPS for this tutorial. I’ve used “this much” memory because I want to run clamd and SpamAssassin in RAM. The server also has 45GB of disk space, which is more than enough to run a couple of big mailboxes on. You could do with less RAM (though that would increase the CPU load and slow down mail processing) and far less disk space (depending on your needs), but with “my” specs, you’re on the safe side.