Running a personal mail server in these times is a little bit complicated but well within the capabilities of anyone who manages servers for a living or even ad

Running a personal mail server in these times is a little bit complicated but well within the capabilities of anyone who manages servers for a living or even advanced hobbyists. That doesn't mean it is a sensible thing for most people to spend their time on. The alternatives are both very good and very affordable. I do it because this isn't any harder than programming or administering other server technologies and the only way to keep skills current is to actively work on real systems. Many things on that list are not necessary to get emails accepted by the big players. There are many email servers with bad or outdated configurations that still work. To keep emails flowing to outlook/hotmail/live etc you need to sign up to SNDS and their junk mail reporting program and if you haven't sent emails there regularly enough to maintain a reputation expect to be blocked for no reason. If that happens there are ways to escalate the issue. The basics you must do is secure your email server. Don't relay email. Have all senders authenticated over secure connection. Web email forms are a bad idea. You don't want to have to recover from being on everyone's block list. If you do any sort of mass mailing you would probably be better off moving it to a specialised email marketing platform. I handle some application related emails myself and you have to be prepared to check delivery problems and follow up. The ones I do are B2B, opt-in, relatively low volume, small number of business email systems who can whitelist and are expecting emails which is just about manageable. The bare minimum to be a good email sender is to have your mail name, hostname and reverse ip all match up and to advertise SPF. I would recommend also signing with DKIM, advertising a DMARC record as these are very widely checked and not that hard. They generally will give a slight negative spam score although the downside is you get the occasional business that doesn't know how to configure their mail system to work with third party filter (eg mimecast). They may reject emails according to your dmarc policy for correctly recognising that your email has been intercepted and tampered with but usually those sort of mistakes get discovered and fixed. If you use an intermediary like this to validate your emails you have to turn off validation of these things on your own server. It probably won't be long until MTA-STS is as widely supported by big emailers and used as a reputation signal so it doesn't hurt to set up a sensible cipher suite and a certificate on your server even if you don't care if emails are sent over tls or not. These addons are mainly a hassle because they all rely on dealing with lots of separate services - mail servers, certificate authorities, web servers, dns servers but this is because smtp didn't anticipate the abuses of the modern world. I have dnssec and DANE as well but it is just for my own amusement like trying to collect all the moons in Mario Odyssey. No big email providers even look at it as far as I know.