About a decade or so ago I did IT for a company that had a large copier that could also scan to email. The email delivery stopped working even though this was Gmail and nothing SHOULD'VE changed (Google has never cared much about standards, so even now it's never surprising when Gmail using normal tools just stops working).

The person who had the company Gmail administration login had tried to open a ticket, had played with settings, had deleted and re-added the account on the copier many times, but nothing worked.

Never being someone who is content to just wait for someone else to, you know, do their job, and not wanting to deal with the proprietary bullshit that is Gmail, I decided to do something far simpler: set up an SMTP server.

A $12 PogoPlug, an SD card, and a couple of hours later (I had to compile Sendmail from pkgsrc), the printer could scan to email and deliver by smarthosting through a public SMTP server.

People will often tell you that something is a waste of time because they don't know how to do it or because "everyone does something else". Some people tell me that running email servers is a waste of time, but standing up a whole server is infinitely easier than trying to deal with Google.

Someone from the company called me many years later and asked me if I wanted my PogoPlug back. It had been in use for at least half a decade before they replaced that copier.