Why I no longer host my emails myself

Mailservers are a royal PITA. And may god help you if your assigned ip block is blacklisted because of some previous user. Mail delivery is just much less painful when you pay someone else with dedicated infrastructure. Kinda sucks because I remember when we all had our own on premises or co-lo mail servers.

I just think that era is dead. Spam has become so crazy- heck I use g suite (google apps) because the gmail spam filter is so powerful. I do not miss going and trying to manually tweak spam assassin rules so XYZ domain can email some user for an important project.

I am guessing this is the case with most HN users these days.

If you can setup your SPF, DKIM and DMARC settings, you'll never have to worry about paying for email services. You can keep your email flowing to customers and maintain your security. Unfortunately, very few sysadmins these days seem to want to spend any time learning the ins-and-outs of successful email delivery.