After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

I stopped self-hosting because it's too much hassle, but it was any difficult to maintain, (by difficult I mean complex)

It didn't worth the time I spent though, so I quit, but I would do it again if I need to

If I had to maintain a server at home and my ISP blocks it, I would get a VPS and host proxies on the VPS and use VPN tunnel to keep the mails stored locally

But I don't have any reason to do that currently, as well as most people

I route outgoing mail to hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com and msn.com domains via email-smtp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com. I started doing this when I noticed a large portion of e-commerce email I was receiving originated from amazon vms and they clearly had no deliverability issues.

The ability to do this is a paid-for service, and needs to be configured appropriately. I was expecting to have to pay for a VM when I set out to do this. However, it turns out you do not need that - you can just configure the SMTP forwarding without needing to purchase any other products, and the cost for this is a few cents per 10k emails, which I can see would be significant for commercial services and/or spammers, but for a private mail server essentially means I will never have to pay. Amazon go to great pains to maintain deliverability for those servers, so you don't have to.

I don't really see a problem with adding one extra SMTP hop to outgoing emails tbh, but as no-one other than Microsoft has (to date) a permanent IP block ban with no recourse whatsoever policy, while I've had transient issues with most other big providers at one time or another, those four Microsoft domains remain the only destination I have to route this way.

This could be a few large providers saying 'we control most email traffic, let's control all email traffic'. Or it could be serious players saying 'spam hurts our users, let's stop criminals using a blanket rule'.

More likely it's a schelling point where large players are rent-seeking (crowding out some competition), but only to the extent they can preserve the illusion this is about policing spam.

Suspect we'll start asking platforms to offer something like due process in the law -- administrative checks that increase the cost to administer a system, and reduce the quality to end users, but increase transparency and make it harder for the platform to engage in corruption.

But that's true for any delivery endpoint in any medium, including physical mail and phone numbers.

It's pretty easy to set up auto-pay for domain names so that all you really need to do is keep the billing info up to date. After that it all runs on autopilot.