It got much much harder to run an email server because all the hoops that had to be jumped through to reduce spam made it a nightmare. I'm not sure I really bla

It got much much harder to run an email server because all the hoops that had to be jumped through to reduce spam made it a nightmare. I'm not sure I really blame Google/Microsoft for that. I have a pretty decent experience on Fastmail and had at one point reasonable experience on Protonmail as well (except that they could never manage to import my enormous 20 year archive of email :D). Most every ISP in the world still offers email, friends and family that have those addresses still manage to get their emails through. There are also plenty of newsletter hosts mail services that don't get dropped or put in spam. Granted those aren't self-hosting, but these other hosting options just reinforce that it's more a matter of spam prevention than it is evil companies being evil (to be clear, I accept they are evil, and they do evil things all the time).