I strongly agree on the point that running your own email service in 2021 is a pain in the a*s.

I strongly disagree on the motivations given by the article (the service you provide will never be on par with Google/Microsoft). This is plain false. There's plenty of webmail clients that look as modern as a Google/Microsoft UI. I even find the Outlook UI to be more primitive and spartan than many open-source UIs.

If running a mail server in 2021 is painful, that's because cloud giants have built a small mafia that, using the excuse of spam protection, excludes anything that doesn't come from a handful of mail services, period.

I used to have my own @mydomain.com mail server back in the golden age of the Internet, with mydomain.com pointing to my sitting in my closet. At some point, around a decade ago, mails sent from there started being refused - Spamhaus really doesn't like SMTP servers with dynamic IPs.

Fair enough. Back then I migrated my home server to a Linode instance. It worked for a while, but then even those emails started being sent back by some providers.

Fair enough - I thought. In theory anybody could still rent a Linode instance, buy a domain name, set up their mail server, and spam the world.

So I moved @mydomain.com under my managed (paid) ProtonMail account, installed a ProtonMail bridge on my server, and forwarded emails this way.

This should be alright, isn't it? I'm paying for a Linode instance connected to my name and surname. I'm paying for a domain name connected to my name and surname. I'm paying for a ProtonMail account linked to my name and surname. What prevents me from sending emails from my own server, using my own domain, my own logic and my own rules? There are so many ways to get back to me as a person in case of abuse, so the risk of spam should be low, right?

Unfortunately, filthy Microsoft thinks differently. Any email sent to @live.com, @outlook.com, @hotmail.com etc. gets sent back, blocked by Microsoft's spam filters. Even if it's sent through a legitimate paid domain name, from a legitimately purchased cloud service, through an account connected to a legitimate and paid ProtonMail account.

So eventually I've resorted to Mailgun to deliver my notifications.

Do you see the sad irony of this situation? Owning a domain, a cloud server and linking your account to a legitimate mail provider is no longer sufficient for you to deliver emails. If you don't want to use a Google/Microsoft/Apple account, then you have to pay extra bucks for a service like Mailgun, whose sole purpose is to do what SMTP servers have been able to do (for free) for the past 5 decades.

So, in a nutshell, running a mail service in 2021 is not difficult because it's hard to set up or it can't compete with the major players. It's difficult because a small mafia of cloud providers have done their best to make it difficult and force you either to use their services, or spend money for doing something that people have been doing for free for decades.

Email was supposed to be an open protocol, and barriers to set up your server used to be low. That's no longer the case. With the excuse of greater security and less spam, a small bunch of companies has built a criminal organization that has turned email into a closed standard, with Google and Microsoft alone running more than half of the traffic in US and Europe.

Shame on us all for giving up such an inalienable right of the Internet without even attempting a fight!