While I do completely agree with that in theory (and I also love mail) I think it does not stand the reality test because of email deliveravility which tends to be a nightmare.
How do you solve this? Do you use a third party SMTP?
You also want some spam filtering, which, these days, is apparently much more powerful with local LLMs. I used to just use various bayesian classification tools, but I've heard that the current state of affairs is better. Having said that, when you've trained the tool, it does a pretty good job.
It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
This is where I disagree. In my opinion it might not be that hard but the maintenance is really not zero as you just described how you need a reputable IP as a prerequisite and constant monitoring of block lists.
Just having DKIM, SPF and DMARC really was not enough last time I checked for getting delivered to let's say outlook.
It would be annoying if entire US/European/Asian ISP IP ranges were immediately blocked. We should have moved on from that for many reasons unrelated to email.
If you're a domain that only receives occasional messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale is viral. You need actively good reputation and response time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more than about 3 months per domain I administered until they were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
> you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one.
I was entertaining the "host your own mail server" thought, I agree that if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you.
Much of the time, when it's for signup verification, especially for a free service, they just write "don't use @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box. The user wants to be signed up for the service more than the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
Even if you host it yourself :-). The key is to own your domain.
And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
I agree to some extent. But it is more involved than deploying a Discourse instance in my opinion.
> And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
100% agree. This is the tradeoff I went for. I would love for it to be easier to self host but you can definitely use another provider.
