Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.

One you don’t wanna join ;) (Google). I’m still on the free tier of what’s now Workspace and intent to move, but I’m dreading the work that comes with it.

A year or so ago Google almost killed the free tier (look up gsuite legacy if you want to know more). Back then I prepared to move away and settled on Zoho as my replacement, but in the end Google responded to the community’s backlash and kept the free tier free for personal use (although there are some other restrictions put in place, so eventually a move is inevitable). Zoho might also give you the features you want.

I use my own domain and have support for aliases and also have a catch all. No need to selfhost for that.

I would not recommend running your own email server. Major email providers like gmail only accept email from servers that have all kinds of measures in place to make them as trustworthy as possible. That’s hard and probably not possible on a home internet connection.

Filtering incoming spam is also a pain in the ass.

It’s nice as an exercise to learn how email works, but I would not rely on it.

Thanks for the hard work. I’ve cancelled my Patreon and switched to Liberapay.