It's not generally true unless you're a Capital-E grade Enterprise customer running a single server as a side component of a much larger Internet presence. Fin

It's not generally true unless you're a Capital-E grade Enterprise customer running a single server as a side component of a much larger Internet presence. Finding connectivity that's not already blacklisted by the GOOG-MSFT email protection racket and will allow individual servers to send outgoing SMTP is basically impossible for sub-enterprise scale organizations. The major cloud services block outbound SMTP for non-Enterprise customers and minor cloud services will already be blacklisted. Getting your mail delivered by GOOG-MSFT also means that you need to have matching forward and reverse DNS, and ideally you should have your own ASN that has never been associated with any addresses that have ever been accused of sending spam. This is an impossible hurdle except for large organizations. The entire email ecosystem is stacked for force smaller players to pay a head tax either directly to GOOG-MSFT, in the form of using their mail services and paying extortionate per-user mailbox costs, or by using paid mail relay services.