I spend $15/mo for a 2 GB / 2 CPUs with 60 GB of SSD disk space and 3 TB transfer at Digital Ocean. I also enable backups on this VM which is $3 extra a month. I then use cPanel to manage the server and that license is $20 a month for five cPanel accounts. You can just pay $15/mo for cPanel if you just need one account. One cPanel account can host unlimited domains, email accounts and forwarders. This lets me keep my personal email accounts separated from my FOSS email accounts. I have given email accounts to friends and family, for free, off of one of my domains, so I have the more expensive license.
That being said, you could setup everything you need: MTA, DNS, Antivirus, DKIM, SPF and Anti-spam yourself on a Linux server and you would just have the costs of the VM. I just pay for a cPanel license to handle that for me. I used to work in commodity web hosting back in the day so installing and managing my email with cPanel is kind of a no brainer to save time. I keep saying I am going to build and automate my own mail server stack... too many sideprojects... not enough time.
Total per month right now is $38 USD.
I spend $15/mo for a 2 GB / 2 CPUs with 60 GB of SSD disk space and 3 TB transfer at Digital Ocean. I also enable backups on this VM which is $3 extra a month. I then use cPanel to manage the server and that license is $20 a month for five cPanel accounts. You can just pay $15/mo for cPanel if you just need one account. One cPanel account can host unlimited domains, email accounts and forwarders. This lets me keep my personal email accounts separated from my FOSS email accounts. I have given email accounts to friends and family, for free, off of one of my domains, so I have the more expensive license.
That being said, you could setup everything you need: MTA, DNS, Antivirus, DKIM, SPF and Anti-spam yourself on a Linux server and you would just have the costs of the VM. I just pay for a cPanel license to handle that for me. I used to work in commodity web hosting back in the day so installing and managing my email with cPanel is kind of a no brainer to save time. I keep saying I am going to build and automate my own mail server stack... too many sideprojects... not enough time.
There are FOSS mail server projects out there like github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver and mailu.io/1.7/ which both seem pretty promising.
If you are interested in running your own mail server, it is totally do able. I have since 2002 :)