Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

What equipment would you buy? Would you buy 1U rack servers and put them in a rack case? Perhaps place a case itself in a large safe to protect from fire and intruders?

What distro would you use?

What sort of disks would you select?

And how about the in/out email stack itself? What's the most performant/consistent/private way to run your own SMTP and IMAP servers?