Email is just as useable as it was years ago as long as you run your own server. The oft-mentioned spam problem has been dealt with, I hardly ever see any of it

Email is just as useable as it was years ago as long as you run your own server. The oft-mentioned spam problem has been dealt with, I hardly ever see any of it - as in maybe a few items per year - and certainly get less spam on my self-hosted addresses than I see on the Gmail-address I keep around for testing whether Gmail accepts mail from my server. This is another ruse often thrown by those who don't believe in self-hosting services, insisting that Google and Microsoft simply refuse to interoperate with self-hosted mail servers. While I can not speak for others I do know this not to be true for my server. It probably comes down to correctly configured SPF and DKIM records, making sure your server does not act as an open relay so as to avoid getting t blacklisted somewhere and using a smarthost (i.e. an authenticated SMTP relay) to send mail. The latter is especially important if your network segment happens to be listed on some DNS blacklist somewhere. Self-hosting has the added advantage of offering "unlimited" storage space, as many addresses using whatever creative schemes you want - I give specific addresses to all commercial/government/organisational institutions I communicate with which allows me to spot who abuses or leaks addresses and makes it possible to block those and only those addresses. SMTP and IMAP have their warts but they remain among the few well-specified open protocols which enable communication with anyone who can follow the standards. Any "successor" to these better be just as open, well-specified and preferably backwards-compatible with SMTP or it probably won't fly.