The “mail is hard” myth

Which user demographic is running one's own email server ideal for?

My consultancy handles "all things technology" for multiple small businesses (sized 1-50 people, located mostly in South Asia). Anecdotally:

A lot of these folks are happily using mybusinesname.accounts@gmail.com and so-on, but decide to get their own domain for the added veneer of "professionalism".

Many are happy to use Yandex (1000 users with your own domain for free @10GB/inbox. Probably not appealing for some Americans given US-Russia political issues).

Startups/sole entrepreneurs typically come to us after they've purchased a GoDaddy domain and selected the "Business Email" option upon checkout, so they just continue using it.

There's a small sample of companies who are willing to pay for Google Apps because they like Gmail's web UI, and they want the rest of the Apps Suite too.

We also deal with a lot of local big corporations for project work. They're almost always using some kind of in-house corporate email system running Microsoft Exchange Server with a number of different rules like no attachments over 5 MB and other such silliness.

For us to invest time in setting up a mail server for a customer there would have to be a very rare confluence of:

a) I don't want Yandex

b) I don't want to pay for Google Apps / Zoho / other

c) (Optionally) I want to send 500000 marketing/transactional emails per day but I don't want to pay Sendgrid/Mailgun/Mailchimp/SES

To set it up we'd have to establish pricing and SLA. Would I agree that we do it for less than $5/user/month? Nope!

I can't really see a compelling case to do it unless you're a hobbyist with strong philosophical perspectives on this topic. Maybe my point of view is different because of Geography but I doubt things are very different elsewhere in the world as far as cost/effort is concerned.

Config files really are not the problem with running email. The "why the hell is provider/BigCo/... XYZ rejecting our emails again" dance is, with the answer typically being "no clue, they certainly won't tell us, let's hope it works in 48 hours?"...

A lot of mail from a variety of providers won't be accepted by gmail. That's the downside of gmail.

I have run my own mail server for years. It absolutely was complicated for me to set up but I loved the process of learning and got it going without too much trouble. Now I can get mail delivered to nearly everyone, except Charter. It's been NBD from a maintenance point of view. Spam is all tuned nicely and I generally don't have to think of it.

E-mail servers are complicated. People with skills and interest can do them, no problem. It's not overly hard. I agree with that.

But I sure don't go recommending it to my friends who wouldn't appreciate spending a few days learning and setting all that up.

What I can do, however, is offer them e-mail accounts! So I guess as long as every group of 50-100 friends has one person willing to run an e-mail server, then we're all good. Of course, it'd probably be a pain to switch when that person dies or loses interest.

Maybe we just need to make it really easy to have a email@myname.tld that is portable and easy to move around.

> it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago

I've been running my own mail server since 2000 or so. It isn't hard, it takes almost no time at all, and I have my own independent mail that nobody reads, and I make the decision of which mail to accept.

I will take the liberty of classifying the above comment as FUD.