It's annoying because hosted email services are strangely expensive. Oh, they'll let you have multiple email addresses for a low rate, but as soon as you want multiple mailboxes (which is just a separate directory as far as the server is concerned), suddenly I'm paying way way more.
Yes, that's part of the issue. Because many home computers got infected by viruses to become bots sending bulk spam, email sourced from residential ip addresses became "guilty until proven innocent".
Even the recent $499 "home email appliance" such as Helm[1][2][3] for private encrypted email ends up using a centralized service such as Amazon AWS for the routing of email packets.
>Oh, they'll let you have multiple email addresses for a low rate, but as soon as you want multiple mailboxes (which is just a separate directory as far as the server is concerned), suddenly I'm paying way way more.
If you don't need business-class type of email service ("business" meaning Outlook sync, shared calendars, 99.999% uptime, etc), then the cheapest way I found for multiple mailboxes is a shared hosting plan. E.g. I pay $49/year for 5 website domains that includes email hosting with unlimited mailboxes. Not just unlimited addresses/aliases but mailboxes. Shared hosting is way cheaper than the $144/year that Rackspace charges for just 5 mailboxes.
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal...
[3] TWIS also had a 1 hour discussion with Helm's CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BhOreZKXPA
Yes, Dreamhost shared hosting includes this.
Mailcow: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/
My blog post: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/mail-server/
Mail for anybody@example.com goes to Pobox, which forwards to me@home.example.com (my home server). My server is configured to send all outgoing mail through Pobox's servers, which avoids the problem of people blocking residential SMTP.
pobox is now owned by fastmail. They are an Australian company and for other reasons (crypto nation state issues) are not always suitable, but technology wise are very smart.
I'm sticking with my @pobox identity, its possible fastmail offer better domain-centric mail forwarding options for you noting the AU crypto law issue.
(in case its not clear, pobox and fastmail are in the same "space" but appear to operate independently)
You do need it to send mail
It's not quite a full-fledged, full-privilege system, but it continues to provide major benefits over Webmail or client-based (POPS, IMAPS) configurations.
Needing to host outgoing SMTP is an anachronism. It's only needed since client IPs are often considered dirty, so hosting it on your home connection can't fix that!
FWIW if you just don't want the responsibility of securing an Internet-facing server yourself but don't mind some config otherwise, you could sort email yourself with fetchmail+procmail or the like.
It's all about reliability - I need my email to work at all points in time. I can't deal with ISPs blocking the port, not to mention everything will flag your emails as spam because it's coming from a residential IP.
If you're selling a commercial offering then you're going to need to fix those issues, otherwise, why wouldn't you pay for a "standard" solution that solves those issues for you?
In my view, this is the recipient's problem, not the sender's.
Also, I ran an email server at home when I was a teenager, the availability of the server was less than I wanted, so I've had to move that email service elsewhere. I suspect relatively average people would have a very hard time operating a satisfactory email service at home even if all of the SMTP stuff is perfectly reliable and foolproof.
I occasionally contribute to the project, and afaik the general opinion is that mail servers would be too tedious and error prone exactly because of this problem. Did I miss something?