@xianc78 I've heard around here that it's unsustainable

I imagine if you never email anyone and only use it for sign up and such, it's probably no problems

@xianc78 I finally stopped after ten years and migrating my last job's server away from self-hosting since 1996 because it became intolerable.

@xianc78

I would only admin an email server if I was paid to do so.

@xianc78 A lot of the bigger VPS’ will block the port for mail and only allow you to open it up after submitting a ticket, think a lot of it is pretty recent, e.g. DigitalOcean doing it in ~2021

@xianc78 I use my web hosting's email service instead of self hosting because even without the blacklisting issues, it's less hassle for something that's got pretty much no security to it anyway

@xianc78 I have experience with self-hosted email, ranging from small boxes to large scale outbound mail operations with hundreds of thousands of emails daily. IMO, people exaggerate the problems a bit. For the orgs that run self-hosted, as long as DKIM, SPF & DMARC are correctly configured with appropriate rDNS, and you didn't happen to get an IP previously used for hardcore spamming, it's a little bit of work upfront but I haven't had to do this constant work that people say it is. Maybe I have just had good luck, but this is even after moving IPs and providers multiple times. I even had servers running on OVH which I know now from spam mitigation work is responsible for a fair amount of it.

The main issues I've had is not with providers like Gmail & Outlook, it's more regional providers, small ISPs etc who have black box rejections and do not respond to any attempts to contact them. A notable example is Comcast, who blocked one domain I'm assuming purely based on its TLD (it had never sent email to them before), and I still have not managed to resolve that situation. This is with a domain hosted on Google Workspace! So no, even those services are not infallible.

But it is completely valid to use a hosted service because not everyone has the expertise or resources to make their systems redundant, secure, usable, etc. And in fact, for personal accounts with possibly critical communication, I do not use self-hosted services for that because I like to err on the side of caution. But to my knowledge, I have never missed any communication on the self-hosted boxes.

@xianc78 I generally use mail to receive, not send. And when I send, it's typically as a reply. They seem to let those through easier. I also read that building up a good reputation helps by sending mails who get market as not spam. I have the impression this indeed helped on MS for the domain I tried this with (never bothered with others).

@xianc78 My experience is it’s nice to do - however the amount of spam is unreal! Even using the likes of Spamhaus it still lets through some dangerous emails. I used to use squirrelmail, roundcube, Zimbra with various mtas until about 7 years ago. For ease of other users I switched to ms365 - it just works. One less headache. I don’t like MS but somethings just are worth paying for. Saves me time and money.