Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

There were many threads previously on how bad/impractical it is to self-host your email. For example, this thread[1] is just a few days ago.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience combining the microsoft 365 business basic (6$ a month) with self-hosted email server? By relaying SMTP through the Microsoft provided outlook server, would my custom domain be free from being marked by spam?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379

[flagged]

Do the same but use a http://postmarkapp.com or https://www.smtp2go.com account where you likely pay nothing unless you're a heavy sender.

Had an issue with my self hosted email going to spam and these services solved it.

You can also try to use your domain registrar SMTP as relay, in case they offer you a mail service, and setting their SPF records to the domain. I have set it up with Gandi and works pretty good.

Don't know about the effect on the spam ranking, but on the flip side you'd lose some privacy.

For example, email notifications sent by Stripe are delivered over TLS'd connections. My bank does this too. If you are to proxy these, the relay will obviously be in the loop on all emails that aren't local to your mail server.