At the time I was paying for DNS. Then, most, if not all, DNS registrars which are not requiring a whatng cartel web engine are now gone.
The email people were careful to design the email system to work without DNS, then I went IPv[46] literals. It is stronger than SPF, since if the SMTP IP does no match the IPs in the envelope and the headers the email will be dropped.
But the "geniuses" at gmail ignore that and say that I don't have a DNS PTR record... how convenient... (My ISP does provide a PTR service... gated behind the requirement of a 'whatng cartel' web engine...).
And I don't forget about "spamhaus", a shady swiss/andoran company, which many email admins have a weird tendency to pay that for their block lists which includes ISP consumer IPs (people do not have the right to have an email server, ofc).
We are going to endup with with compuserve/AOL all over again.