BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
Hosting your own E-mail (and website, if you're so inclined) is not technically difficult to do, and doesn't demand a lot in the way of server resources (an old AMD Opteron box that was taken out of service some 15 years ago hosts my mail, routing, NAT, etc.)
A lot of people aren't going to have a way to host an email server on-prem and will need to rent a cloud server of some sort, because blocking incoming port 25 to residential customers is a common way to cut down on open relays running on hijacked computers. For someone paying for a service now maybe that's not a big deal, but for people used to free email it may be a deal breaker.
The other aspect to consider is maintenance. Once you've got a mail server on the net you're gonna need to keep up on your security patches and monitoring for intrusion attempts. Sure you can turn on auto-updates and you'll
probably be fine...until you're not.
Here's a simple example. I currently run two cloud-hosted servers for myself, one for Minecraft for me and the wife, and one that runs my blog and an email server. The email server is solely for the use of a friend of mine whose domain I have hosted for nearly 25 years, going way back to when I ran an ISP. About two months ago he hits me up on FB and says "hey I'm not getting email". So, I go poke around...I see email coming in, and I see it delivering to his inbox. But he's not seeing it. After much digging it turns out somebody decided to deprecate some older TLS certs that were being used by the IMAP server, so his client wasn't actually logging in.
Anyway, my point is, while it's not hard to set up an email server, it does take some elbow grease (and either existing knowledge, or good Google-fu) to maintain it. Not everyone has the skills and/or time to do that, and that's fine.
That being said I understand your sentiments. I've been on Gmail almost since it opened, and I'm more entrenched in the Google ecosystem than I care to admit. Ever since the death of free Workspace accounts though I've been mulling over hosting my own email again; I've got the server space after all. I am just not yet sure if I want the added responsibility in my life right now.
BTW I' not surprised you like sendmail. The config file looks like old school line noise.