> i think the myth of "you can't self-host email" persists because while it can evidently be done, basically all of the software involved is ancient, baroque, inconsistently documented, requires a PhD in Bullshit to correctly configure, and is almost actively hostile to observation. but this is _annoying_, very different from _impossible_, and fortunately mostly solvable by delegating the annoying bits to an expert using something like NixOS to make it reliably work

Why are they calling this a “myth” when they readily admit that even when you are an expert who has been doing it for years, there’s still problems sending to the biggest providers in the world?

There is zero practical difference between “you need to be an expert and you will still fail to get something fundamental working” and “you can’t self-host email”.

> Microsoft 365 however apparently will hate your email no matter what. you learn to live with it

Or you don’t self-host but use a major email provider and don’t have the problem.

> there exist several pieces of folk wisdom:

> - "you cannot run your own mail server in 2025, this is too hard and time consuming" (completely false, i've done this since ~2010 with minimal ongoing maintenance)

This seems completely true according to what they themselves write. It is too hard and time consuming.

> I think the combo of "roll the IP gacha a few times" + "let it sit for 8 months while the VM idles" probably did me a lot of good here

Is letting it sit for eight months not “time consuming”?

> until I cleaned up my IP reputation (which has been awful for almost a decade) Gmail refused to deliver to anything but spam

This is not in any way acceptable to the average person, and it does not meet what most people would describe as “I can self-host email”. “I can self-host email but Gmail sends me to spam” is functionally equivalent to “I cannot self-host email”.