For 20ish years I ran my own mailserver, on a Debian box. All my mail was accessed directly via mutt/lumail, from beneath ~/Maildirs
Last year I trialed fastmail, but didn't like it, so now I'm paying for GSuite. I have two users setup - a domain admin, and my own "real" user.
I've been using unique addresses at my domain ("reddit@example.com", "lwn@example.com", etc) so I had to setup an address-map to get around the alias-limits. But that niggle aside I've been enjoying the way it all works out.