h0r14

In that case, the IP is screwed. I plan change IP, or hop hosts if/when this happens. I opened 6 accounts on 6 different hosts, and only two are active for this reasons. So far so good :)

Privacy from host is not possible, and you make a very good point about hardware access.

Virtual machine are secured by the shared host. I don't really expect top security from this end. A replica backup MX enables me to safely change hosts, if they behave badly.

OpenBSD defaults are what I base my endpoint security on, and keeping this updated is super easy.

I think Step 7 is a good idea. Initially, I asked some contacts to send me an email from Gmail and Protonmail, to which I replied. From then on, my emails work fine with them (negative spam score).

I used http://multirbl.valli.org/ but who knows how many are out there, not including private lists.

I'm in your reverse situation, a long time free-email user. Given the latest news, I decided to self-host my email address and not have a 3rd party filter my Inbox.

I'm surprised how easy it is, and having fun with sieve scripts :)

When renting a dedicated box, a VNC-like interface is required to enter disk encryption password, which could be intercepted by the host. Moreover, this has to be done on each restart. I look at dedicated box more as an upgrade from VPS.

For privacy, I think user encrypted email messages provide the best option.

At home self-hosting through VPN is a good idea. It would involve maintaining hardware, which I traded for low cost VPS. With a replica backup MX, I am not married to any hosting provider, and can hop without downtime.

I guess I was lucky because I haven't encountered a "dirty" IP yet, but I only tested 6 VPS providers so far.

PTR records are updated from the VPS provider web interface, it takes a few seconds to activate.

Yes, and for junk I chose rspamd for Bayes classification, very effective so far.