I surprise myself too.

A lot of the free email accounts want a phone number to open it. Is there anyway to spoof one to get the a verification code or some other way around it?

Blur service made by Abine offers spoofing phone numbers (and e-mail and credit cards) but to access that part you need premium and you likely need to give them your real number so you just shift your target who you want to trust.

I host my mails at home because I’m paranoid, and because it’s easy.

I use Mailinator, and stopped worrying about the NSA, privacy issues, insecure passwords, spam and all that stuff. What a bliss!