Interesting that self-hosting isn't on his list. It hits every one of his checkboxes and only costs you an old Linux server collecting dust at home (or at most, a $5/mo VPS), which you can also use to host other things.
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
I've tried this approach, but I found that most email providers aggressively filter out all incoming messages that don't come from validated sources. No matter what I tried deliverability of emails remained very spotty. I did configure DKIM, DMARC, SPIF, etc as suggested. But minimal improvements. Eventually ended up going with AWS SES.
I haven't spent any real amount of time looking into this, but from the basic research I did perform, I found that well-written guides that aren't grossly out of date are hard to find.
Also, my understanding is that Google, Outlook and other major email services have been implementing as many roadblocks for self-hosted setups as possible to the point where it's a constant battle and difficult to keep up with.
I’ve actually tried before to self host on my VPS as well as my homelab that I use for various services. I honestly just didn’t trust the stability of my own services enough for something as important as email. As a project I definitely want to try again in the future.
The problem with self hosting is getting through google, microsoft, etc spam filters.
It depends a lot on whether you need the account for reading email, sending email to your own accounts, or sending email to other people. The first two are very easy to self-host.
But agreed that mass-mailing (even account registration style emails) seems a lot less reliable because of those spam filters.
it's only "difficult" because google, microsoft, etc have conivenced the community that self-hosting e-mail is not possible and for some reason, further propetuated by IT influencers that have drank that koolaid.
all complete bullshit; they arbitrraly occasionally block to protect their moat raping privacy. e-mail is the most rewarding self-hosting capability. like anything, there is a learning curve but at the end of the day: it's easy, stable, a pleasure to host. there are solutions that ease the learning curve. after a while, all the e-mail do make it through.
i'm so happy that my communications are not indexed by these hyperscalers.
stop listening to these pussies claiming how difficult it is. they're projecting their limitations.
It didn't help that people are seemingly more offended about the possibility of spam on their inbox than on losing a valuable email due to misclassification.
There's little to no incentive for providers to ever de-escalate.
At my day job, we use Gsuite. I never used it for any non-work purpose, and it wasn't publically published, so any "spam" it got was false positives. Emails I actually needed were being buried below the fold in the spam folder. It turns out there is no obvious way to 100% disable spam filtering (at the time I got the first false-positive at least) so I had to try to just allowlist things that should be left alone.
Isnt email blacklisting/actually getting mails to inbox infamously hard? I otherwise think the rest of the stack is indeed solved, but its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably
Everyone has the same problem. For example, Apple recently blocked a service that notifies you of parliamentary documents (source in Dutch: https://chaos.social/@tkdocs@mastodon.nl/117370967171338864)
Email receivers (be it Gmail or your local council) don't differentiate if you're self hosting or a business. So long as small businesses can manage (who have like one part-time sysadmin that also manages a ton of other IT stuff; email doesn't take much of their time), so can you. If you set up the usual suspects like SPF and DMARC, the domain is not a known spammer, and the IP not in a blocked address range, it's mostly hands-off (source: I self host my email)
If you need it to really be super reliable, yeah, you need to send through one of the big companies who have not just a dedicated sending IP address but entire ranges dedicated to email sending, as well as staff that will respond to delivery issues 24/7. Microsoft rejecting email from Google and vice versa isn't unheard of, so there aren't guarantees anywhere, but that would be your best bet. For my personal use, that extra nine of reliability isn't needed