I self hosted mail til 2008.. Sometime in 2008 we were travelling more than at home so I moved to a virtual private server. During those travels, the VPS had catastrophic failures so I bit the bullet and moved the domain to google apps and it worked quite well. The intention was to move back to my own hosting when settled again, the gmail keyboard shortcuts are so good (not quite mutt) which has kept me there.

I use offlineimap to keep a local backup of my email, and like anyone should, I think of emails as postcards. If its only to be read by the recipient use encryption!