> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering.
I wish this meme could die. gmail spam filtering isn't particularly good, it never has been. They crank up the false positive rate high enough that the spam in your inbox is about comparable to other solutions, but at the expense of tons of false positives.
I've had a gmail account since the launch. Been there got the tshirt (literally.. have a tshirt of the launch when they were bragging about 1GB storage). I've also been managing email servers and mailing lists since the very early 90s to today.
Notice every site that interacts with email has the ubiquitous warning abot "check your spam folder"? Not solely, but largely a legacy of so many users on gmail getting used to so much legitimate email going to spam. it doesn't have to be that way.
You can easily to an order of magnitude better on fewer false positives while still getting less spam overall in your inbox, by running your own email servers.
I haven't had a false positive in ... certainly many years on my own email on my servers. And a bit less spam getting through than on the gmail account.
> Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.
gmail has a big false positive problem, yes, but it isn't any worse for you as a sender if you run your own email servers. I experience more false positives emailing from work account to work account (both sides hosted by gmail) than from personal account (hosted by me) to gmail.
> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well
Spam filtering is actually not hard anymore. I've been running email servers and mailing lists from before spam existed, through its rise and later fall. There was a time, ca.2000, when it was hard. Because nearly every legitimate email server was misconfigured, so one had to allow it all through, but most was spam. So it took a lot of client side filtering.
These days, very easy. Legitimate senders are well configured, so just reject all misconfigured clients at the SMTP connection. There, that's 95%+ of spam blocked. The few remaining items are easily filtered by whichever bayesian filter you like. I'm using spamprobe. Done. No spam. No false positives.