Your processing of incoming traffic in no way affects outgoing email from your web server. What I’m trying to illustrate is that other email server operators will view email coming from a broadband pool of IPs (which your web server will have when hosted at home) as suspicious and high risk, in the same way you are (correctly) treating traffic coming from amazon ec2 which is unlikely to be legitimate visitors.
There are boatloads of legitimate services – such as many folks browsing the web on kindles – that use the IAAS to serve legitimate uses.
I’ll note that in general recent versions of Microsoft’s web stack have been more secure and just as if not more reliable than comparable non-microsoft options. Apache is the old, dated kid on the block who has a broken security model in 2014.
Just a quick reply, to say thanks for sharing, and acknowledge that I have read them,
I think , even if I do start a “home server”, especially for my e-mail, I would keep using the paid hosting I use,
For me that is importan that it is reliable.
After all is said it would not do any harm to try it out and it could be an interesting project for you. From what I remember you need some DNS settings so the users can find you and there are some companies around which will provide them free - I can not remember the one I was recommended when I was looking to do my own storage server a couple of years ago.
You could also use it as your personal cloud storage - again I can not remember the name but there is some software based on torrent? which allows you to setup a cloud type system.
Why do you say that? On Apache’s own web site it says that exploits are generally down to the add on code running on it rather than the server itself.