IP exposure behind Cloudflare / Plesk setup

Hey all,

I’m running multiple websites (not just Laravel) on a VPS behind Cloudflare with deployment via Plesk.

Everything works great, except for one thing: email.

I feel like I’m basically forced to rely on services like Mailgun or Fastmail, mainly because:

• My origin IP is still technically reachable
• Self-hosting mail would expose that IP directly
• VPS IP reputation for email is usually poor anyway

This becomes more noticeable when you run multiple apps/domains and don’t want everything tied to external providers.

So I’m curious:

• Is anyone here actually self-hosting email for multiple sites/apps?
• Or is using external providers just the standard these days?
• Any setups where self-hosting is still viable without hurting deliverability or exposing your server?

Right now it feels like:

You can host your apps yourself, but email is basically outsourced by default. I was actually thinking about a different approach: Using a cheap shared hosting package purely for email.

Curious how others handle this.

Thanks!