1999 was a pretty late adopter to the self-hosting email cause since it was pretty apparent since 1997 that free email was going to win out. As Gmail filters get smarter then it becomes an altogether more fruitless cause. Email hosting at the individual level died out for most due to this and the pointless rivers of spam you had to deal with. If you've only now come to the realization that you can't make it then you've been wasting a lot of your life.