What a hunch and loathing I feel here…but I’ll try to populate your reaction with an example.
When Google decided to withdraw all free Gmail accounts for your domain accounts, I naturally had to look for a solution, I now had about 5 email addresses for a total of 3 people, including an office manager @ which is a commitment to some service. When I started doing the math I quickly came to the point that all of this would be very expensive for me and it might be better if I looked at my own solution.. the semi-free part of the transip suddenly became much more expensive, and as that said also the private postal solution with me.
After some time it was added that o356 (family) will demolish domains features in outlook and this solution too…
Luckily I have fiber at home so self-hosting (in the case of email via a sending app via a smart host to stay out of the blocklist) is an option.
I then went to do the math, an old MITX desktop PC with AMD A10 7870 3.6gh quad core processor working perfectly with 16GB is more than enough.
So you look at the power consumption. Regardless of the cost of e-waste, the fact that I throw away about 10-12€ per day in electricity (compared to a newly built PC), (110W CPU instead of 15W), made it clear to me that this may not be a discussion of the environment. It’s all as simple as it sounds in principle.