Email is often impossible. you can run your own server but you won’t be able to send email to many people because gmail and other larre providers will ignore everything from any ip address you can get. you endeup with email for only people on you server and the what is the point.
just a warning there. Some do self host email but it is the most difficult to host. My life is much better now that I pay fastmail to handle my email.
Start small. The hard part isn’t installing a lot of software and getting it running. The hard part is keeping everything updated over time. So install one interesting service, and then figure out how the update process goes before installing another. Hopefully the worst thing that happens is you install services and use them only to have the computer fail in a few years after you depend on them and you can’t figure out how to get the data into the new version. There is also the very real possibility that your service is compromised by an attacker.
I name them after a female important character in whatever novel I’m enjoying when I set the system up. Back when I was single the female was important, now it is just tradition.
Since I like fantasy there are plenty of names available that are both pronounceable and nonsense.
I live in an area with a lot of iron. I cannot trust a compass to always point north. Generally I’ve had no problems in the woods: follow the trails that are on the maps, or at least stay close enough that you can always find them again and you are fine. (until of course you are not)
My NAS is behind a firewall and doesn’t normally run the types of things you would compromise. (no web browser). They need to break many things at the same time to compromise it. I’m not saying it would be impossible to compromise my NAS, but is is very unlikely just because of how difficult it is. If I’m target of a state level attack I’m sunk anyway.
though offline backups are always a good idea. However they by definition need several days to restore (if they take less than that they are too easy for an attacker to target)
I put all my data on a NAS with non-writable snapshots so hackers cannot destroy my data.
I tried home assistant in docker. Easyetoeget working but for some unknown they make it hard to install extentions so I couldn’t get some things working.
i installed openhab instead which works though there are less extentions available.