It's a tragedy. The people who designed SMTP went to insane lengths to make sure mail was delivered. The people who initially implemented it did the same. Then the "free" mailbox providers fucked it all up. I host my own email, and I now have no clue as to whether it will be delivered.

On the other hand, I’ve had only good experiences with self-hosting my email.

I’ve never had issues with being blacklisted or anything.

But I’ve been sending with SPF + DKIM + DMARC + ADSP all configured and enabled since day one, and with TLS transport for all sent emails.

That usually gives a major boost in trustworthiness.

Unless your IP address is deemed being in a bad block. Then all of the above is not even checked (on outlook.com, that is).

This matches my experience as well. I rarely if ever get sent to a spam folder. And afaik, I've never been blacklisted after ~5 years.

I have everything properly set up, and wasn’t blacklisted once in any service since 2002.... until 3 months ago, when Google decided to blacklist my domain, but only randomly (e.g. mails sent to same person on same day get delivered to inbox or spam seemingly based on a coin toss).

The only clue I have so far is that in some discussion, it was mentioned that google penalizes a domain of a lot of different emails from it get forwarded to google - and I do have my catchall forwarded to a gmail box.

We now live in a world where google can make you and your communication channels disappear, and they don’t really answer to anyone.

Have you tried to check https://postmaster.google.com/? You _may_ get an insight on what went wrong those 3 months ago

That requires hundreds or thousands of emails from your domain per day to show anything - which is useful if you run a major service, but for the use case of "every person hosts their own email", it’s not exactly useful.

Well, you're right, though I've seen data in there for domains with about 10k emails per month.

Still, that's probably way over the home email setup threshold.