I use Mail-in-a-Box on a small VPS. Have been doing so for about 10 years. It takes care of basically everything.
Last year I subscribed to a small-time email provider, anydomain.net, because I got tired of playing whack-a-mole with services blocking my entire subnet due to spammers on the VPS. All told I probably spend ~US$20 per month to host it.
SSH key auth for terminal login, plus an nginx proxy and client cert auth on anything accessible by the outside world. I’ll expose any internal service I want because nobody is getting through the client cert auth.
Let’s not pretend all of this stuff is high art. Look, if they really need to watch Krampus: Origins, they can download it again.
After a bunch of digging, I was able to find this documentation for configuring Slack integrations with shoutrrr, which is the notification system bolted on to scrutiny. After quite a bit more trial and error, I wasn’t able to get token auth working (it appears shoutrrr’s updated docs are already out of date), but I was able to make webhooks work. Gotta say, shoutrrr’s configuration strings are awfully user-hostile.
After some more trial and error, I was able to get SMTP auth working after removing all special characters from my password and setting it to a stupidly long randomly generated string.
I used scrutiny years ago, but recall not being happy with it for some reason. I’ll give it another try.
Edit: I remember now. The notification configuration is next-level awful. The documentation is close to nonexistent. Getting basic SMTP auth is non-functional. Finding an actual example of a slack notification configuration is impossible. Have any working configs you can share?
I have a dynamic IP and have been using it for years. I also host my own mail server on a VPS using miab which provides my DNS. My router supports pushing DDNS changes, so as soon as my IP changes, I’m able to update my external DNS and everything is all good.
If you can reliably update an external DDNS service, I can’t see paying for a static IP for your self-hosted stuff.
Would Plex be an option here? I don’t use it, but I know it has a photo library feature.