observantTrapezium

Digital only. Who even has room for physical books.

Have autoplay disabled

You can’t successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)

You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

Also note that if it’s just for personal use, you don’t have to have a domain for HTTPS. You can self sign, or create your own certificate authority, you just need to clients to trust it. But domains can be cheap or even free, so it’s better to get one so you don’t have to specially configure your devices.

Borg for backup. I’m really surprised it’s not more widely known. It’s an incredible piece of software.

Also, not really lesser known software, but a lesser known feature of file systems including the ones we use in FOSS operating systems: extended file attributes - useful to add metadata to files without modifying them.

+1 for Whisper. Also, I use Piper for the reverse (text-to-speech).

Not sure it satisfies your requirements but I’m quite happy with Baïkal.

Borg is great.

Abrechnung is really good and actively developed and improving. The UI is already pretty satisfactory, and there’s also an API which is needed if for example you want to bulk-import a spreadsheet, for now you have to code it a bit.

Came here to say just that. The WebDAV synchronization target is great.

Joplin as well, syching my 3 devices with the WebDAV option. I checked a few other options about a year ago and Joplin seemed the best.

A mid-late 24th century Starfleet runabout?

Digital for sure. Who has room for physical books? The physical books that I’ve somehow gathered over the years are the worst items I have in terms of volume (or mass) relative to their utility.

Piper is my choice. Very easy to use from the command line, fairly good sounding voices. Prior to that, for years (decades?) I used espeak-ng, had a very robotic voice but articulated almost everything very clearly, and I got used to it so didn’t actually mind.

I’m very happy with self-hosted Vaultwarden.

Baikal is lean and great. I use it and sync to my Thunderbird (using the TbSync extension) and Android phone (using DAVx⁵).

Agree about Joplin. No need for a full NextCloud instance, I use the WebDAV option which Apache has pretty much out of the box.

If your email server is offline then mail won’t be delivered. The sender’s server will retry as other have noted, but how often and how many times varies. Hosting at home, even when possible, is not a great idea in my opinion.

There are endless options for hosting out there, I don’t want to name names since I only really have experience with one.

That is not my experience.

Not for everyone, but self-hosting isn’t so bad.