Two years ago I felt the same way. Then I ran a mail server for our small family business. And of course, we had DKIM, SPF and DMARC. At first, everything was

Two years ago I felt the same way. Then I ran a mail server for our small family business. And of course, we had DKIM, SPF and DMARC. At first, everything was great. Then we started having bizarre deliverability problems to a growing provider of corporate emails. So after trying a number of solutions, we settled on SES. All was great again. Then we started having weird deliverability problems that resulted in bounced emails to an accountancy firm. One of the public IPs ended up on a blacklist. This got fixed fairly swiftly. Things were good again. Then it happened again. Yes, deliverability can be solved – the question is for how long. Maybe we chose poorly with SES, but it seems other providers have had problems. I ultimately concluded that it's really not worth the hassle, and we ended up with the email provider that was causing us the bulk of the problems. It was a difficult pill to swallow, and I realize that I've done my part in making the problem worse. But sometimes, life is too short. The world was different a decade ago. We didn't have overzealous spam filters by default that self-reinforce their awful decisions. I appreciate that spam is a really hard problem. But the solution we have is worse than the problem: we've just made an oligarchy of email, where not even all the big players have the clout to keep themselves out of blacklists all of the time. And with all that said, for a personal email server, I still might self-host – but I'd be prepared for emails to not get reliably delivered.