It's weird how 'the cloud' has put people into the mindset where email isn't just a complementary service that runs alongside the web server and just works. Nope. Sign up for a third party service and if you're serious pay for it.
I once sent a companies first newsletter after 14 years to about 300,000 people using our Sendgrid plan and a self-hosted PHP newsletter tool that we'd paid for (the name escapes me). The first several hundred bounces happened and they froze our deliveries, called us up and grilled us about where we got our email list. Once we proved the origin they let everything go again and didn't have another problem.
It was a little shocking at first but at the same time, it's good to know how aggressively they work to protect deliverability. You don't get that by running your own and it's an even bigger deal if you have user generated content triggering messages.
Running a mail server is a lot of work, and you have a lot of responsibility when it comes to securing it to make sure it doesn't become a source of unauthorized spam.
Hu? How is that more difficult than making sure that your $mailservice account doesn't become a source of spam?
It's more that the big feudal lords don't accept trade from small freeholders.
Companies that provide these services have to spend countless hours stopping spammers using their services to send mail. But they do it for your benefit, despite the small costs.
Sending email is cheap, and any reasonable business is probably having sending email as one of its lowest costs. We really should be grateful to most of these companies to work so hard on our behalf to keep it that way.
And what about individuals?
> We really should be grateful to most of these companies to work so hard on our behalf to keep it that way.
I don't think so. They are also keeping it hard to run your own mail server. Plus, they get to have access to tons of other people's emails, which is a terrible idea. What's the point of introducing SMTP-STS when you then create some few central entities that hold all the keys?