Check your autorenewal failure alerts go somewhere you’ll react to.

I holidayed in a village in France and got around fine by a mix of bus, bike and train, and it looked ok to do that if you lived there and worked, but most of the locals still drove because there were occasional journeys where cars really helped and once you decide to sink €000s into a car, it’s then cheap to use it for each extra journey instead of wait for a bus or train, or take time to pedal or walk a bit to stops.

So I think it could be possible even in villages, but some services will need making easier to reach without cars.

I certainly know plenty of places where local governments aren’t even trying, of course.

That depends who’s hosting it. There’s few good reviews of email hosting out there at the moment.

Even if you self-host, other people’s mailservers still interact with it, unless you only chat with other users you host. And some of the big webmails variously get really pernickity about your DNS, DKIM and more, or they deploy some pretty obnoxious countermeasures against your server with little explanation. So I’d say it’s more often both than not, no matter what you do. If you think it’s not being a pain, there’s probably an unpleasant surprise in your server logs or coming soon!

It’s still often worth self-hosting, but that’s more big webmail really sucks, even ISPs often don’t set their mailservers up well and it’s often an early casualty of ISP managers looking for costs to cut.

Those apt commands are in a less-good order. It’s usually better to update apt, then upgrade the system.

I upgrade as soon as reasonably possible after the notification appears, if the system isn’t on auto-upgrade.