My two cent about emails servers field. Over a two decades...

Hi,

It had been twenty year that I stopped my couples of self-hosted email servers.. ( That did run on a 10 years span )

Now, I'm digging to relaunch one.. OMG the GAFAM etc... did well screw us !!

I think those two post summarize well what happened...

On the technical level email are OLD ! ~1982(SMTP), and since then few revisions were released, but they only build extra thing complexity on top of it !! and the last revision date was in 2008 ! ( 17 year ago... )

And they are complex because of this build-up,
\ For the example, the list of the daemons running in docker-mailserver give a clue...

• Postfix
• Dovecot
• Rspamd
• Amavis
• SpamAssassin
• ClamAV
• OpenDKIM
• OpenDMARC
• Fail2ban
• Fetchmail
• Getmail6
• Postscreen
• Postgrey
• Support for LetsEncrypt, manual and self-signed certificates
• SASLauthd with LDAP authentication
• OAuth2 authentication

On the mass level, the GAFAM managed to convince the mass that email server (and more broadly any self-hosted (aka computing) ) is complicated, so "let's us do" that could be understand as "Let's us own your technology"

For a time I was thinking "maybe I should get away from email, that only belong the GAFAM now... and maybe found an alternative... ?" But If I found an alternative, I must convince the others to do the same... slower... way slower...

No ! , the first step is to have more and more people re-owing their technology ! So having more and more self-hosted email server again..

To reverse the tendency, instead of feeling like a black sheep (and be censored) to not have a GAFAM email. It will be people that use a GAFAM email that will pointed out ! to have deleted ( or move email to SPAM without reason etc..) your email from YourEmail@MyLittleHosting.MyPlace

If you use a none GAFAM email ( like me ), and someone tell you:
\ "hoo sorry I didn't get it"
\ "Sorry, I didn't see it, it felt in my SPAM folder" (with a tone that's your fault because you use something else than everyone else (aka GAFAM))

Please note, that legally, is their responsibility ! Whenever it was automated or not !
\ If your MTA[^MTA] did send your email the the recipient MTA it's their sole responsibility...\

and if the attempt has been blocked before reaching the destination MTA, by a firewall or something else on their side (even on ISP level), no matter if they own it or not, it's also their responsibility :) )

[^MTA]: Mail Transfer Agent Handles the transfer of emails between servers using SMTP