I use SES just for delivering emails while hosting the emails myself. Feels like an optimal solution.

> I have many gigs of email > don’t want to pay many tens of dollars/month

How many gigs? It appears that the 100GB plan is only $9/mo.

Whoa. That’s very different from the last time I checked, perhaps they changed either their plans or their structure. I saw it previously as additional storage I’d have to add. 100G would be enough! Wow thank you!

Is it? I pay $5 for 50gb, which is many years of email (including all the spam/newsletters, which I really don’t need to keep)

If you have iCloud you have the option of using a custom domain. I think I only pay a few bucks a month.

For various reasons I’d rather have an indie provider. I’m currently on Google and trying to decentralize my data.

Ok, if the amount of data is a problem, another option is to just download your mbox from Google takeout, treat it as an archive, and use something like notmuch to search your old mails. You can then store and backup the mbox anywhere you want.

In addition to the iCloud, I have a free ProtonMail account, which I use sparingly, and anything large or important that comes in there I move to local backup and delete. 99% of the messages I get can just be deleted. If you set up pop3 you can auto delete from the server. That’s the old school solution, but it depends on your use case. The pop3 option doesn’t work well with multiple devices.

Maybe self-host an IMAP server, and periodically archive from FM to your box/VM?