I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm

I still handle email for multiple small businesses (for over 20 years) and recently switched from the mailscanner+spamassasin to rspamd and the scanning is so much better/easier now

my backend is still dovecot+postfix, still works beautifully. I am able to run rspamd+dovecot proxy on a small vps and the storage is handled by a backend office server with dovecot. If VPS has an issue can spinup another easily/anywhere and backend is also virtualized (libvirt) so easily restored (with multiple backups in multiple places)

biggest thing to worry about with deliverability is ensuring your SPF and DKIM (opendkim) are correct, which is not too difficult and rspamd is able to handle the dkim signing/verification which is nice

It’s not hard to receive or filter mail - knowing that somebody will receive your email after you send it is another thing entirely.

I’m wondering what the most fool proof way to get a message delivered to someone else is. I found out today some SMS messages I sent were silently dropped. Email doesn’t always get delivered. I would hope the closed ecosystems like Signal and Whatsapp are better at this and in any case you need both parties to agree on a channel. I just like email because my identity is maintained even when I switch providers, and nothing else quite like that exists.

That is the exact problem that got me to abandon my splendidly working, self-hosted email stack. I had so many instances of mail just not getting delivered, despite doing absolutely everything correctly, that I gave up.

Thankfully not a problem we've encountered yet. All my mail is DKIM signed, SPF aligned etc. I also registered on dnswl.org which is a signal quite a few people seem to use.

out of curiosity, are you talking about personal, small business, or corporate?

"spam is solved" looks a lot different at each of those

Personal mailserver sorry. rspamd stops all the sent-using-my-from-address "i hacked you" emails (DMARC drops them) and all the other random spam stuff. I can imagine though a large business with thousands of email accounts it wouldn't be as easy though.