When you send an e-mail, as soon as it leaves your mail server it's out of your control and you have no say in where it goes before it ends up at the recipient. There's no such thing as self hosted sent e-mail.

Sending an email through AWS has strong implications regarding privacy though.

Chances are you’re already compromised eitherways , most mailservers interact with you over STARTTLS, which means any middleman/isp can strip your tls encryption on your emails, midway while you’re reading them over imap. (ISPs worldwide have been caught doing this before)

Most providers do not mandate a strong SSL only imap system.

Along with other similar caveats, do not depend on your mail system to keep your emails private.

If you want privacy, encrypt your emails yourself.

Also most people who selfhost their email usually do not encrypt data at rest. As its not the default norm. As such anyone having access to your disk can compromise you at anytime too (especially likely if you’re using a vps).

So, unless youre encrypting your emails yourself E2E. Assume you have no privacy. If you’re doing E2E, aws cannot decrypt your mails anyways.

There is a large difference between "them" having to m2m smtp sessions to intercept emails versus directly sending the emails through them.

Besides, metadata is probably already more significant than the message contents and encrypyion solves nilch there.

they m2m the imap sessions using the method i described not smtp.

The odds of the emails going through AWS, GCE, or Azure infrastructure in one form or another is probably pretty damn high even if you host your own SMTP service.

Yes but that's the recipient choice. I'm not responsible if they use American cloud providers for their emails, but I am for the ones I send.

Sure, then you can use whatever SMTP option that is best for you. Some people are fine with using American cloud providers and some are not. If they are technical enough to host their own email server, they are more than likely to understand what choices they are making.

My main point was that sending email using AWS SES is not self hosting. Like hosting a website on S3 + CloudFront is not.

If you run your own incoming mail, nobody but you has a copy of your entire mail archive and you are self-hosting that data. It can't be handed over to the government, it can't be sold, it can't be analyzed by gmail, etc. That's where the big win is. If you send e-mail using SES, that's one untrusted hop out in front of an unknown number of untrusted hops that you can't opt into or out of - there's little practical difference. The privacy win come from hosting your own data, not your own smtp server with a carefully curated reputation that you spend hundreds of hours a year working on.

That is _your_ definition of self-hosting. Do you rely on an entity for your internet connection? At some point, you _will_ need to rely on someone else's infrastructure.

I believe the correct way to write it is self-hosting.