> Email seems like such an anachronism. All the big providers manage to get along with each other.

Think of the value of this! Anyone, anywhere, using whatever client they choose, can send a basic message to anyone and expect it to arrive and be taken seriously.

Imagine if IM had worked the same way! I know XMPP is a shitstorm, but one can dream.

Not until I left academia and started working for MegaCorp that mandates outlook web as the only email client did I truly internalize the value of this.

IM can work the same way, by tacking it on top of email: https://delta.chat/en/

(Bonus: encryption is done automatically for you, by default)

Email is not a synchronous channel, and shouldn't be treated as such. Plenty of mailservers will happily delay your messages for a few minutes for spam and virus scanning (because who cares if an email arrives a minute later), and you have all sorts of asynchronous things built into the major servers and protocols (queues, delays/greylisting, 4-day(!!) backoff-retries, etc).

Most of the IM of today isn't synchronous as well. That's the exact reason OTR was deemed not enough, because it requires synchronization, and the Open Whisper guys came up with a novel encryption scheme that works with asynchronicity in mind.

Now of course that doesn't mean you should never be synchronous, and it is true email might not be the best vector here. But from my little experience it's good enough for simple messaging.

Even though it's widely recognized as impossible for individuals to self-host, at least there are many available providers, and any medium+ size organization can self-host. Things could be better but they could be worse too.

I host my family & friends email server for about a half dozen domains for the last 20 years using postfix with courier imap. Once every 5 years, Gmail doesn’t like something and starts sending my emails to spam but it resolves by itself in 2 weeks ;) Otherwise, the only maintenance is OS upgrades every 6 months or so.

By whom? The crowd on HN? Selfhosting email is obviously doable. Selfhosting does not imply residential IP.

It's not reliable. Large providers will black hole you and you don't know until someone says they never got an email. Even following all the rules you get hit and with Google, Microsoft, &c it's impossible to get to anyone to resolve the issue once you know about it. Even for small companies this is a nightmare.

Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV.

And you don't have any control over what they blackhole or reject without even delivering to your inbox/spam folder, if you're their user. You don't get to see logs either.

And big benefit of self-hosting is that you can actually make your server receive everything with no rejection or blackholing. So in that sense, self-hosting can actually be made extremely reliable for reception, and that is much more important to me than reliable sending. So I'd say self-hosting is superior when it comes to reliability, because at least you can make one direction "100%" reliable. With big freemail you can't make any direction comparably reliable.

As soon as you get some IP address reputation, sending gets fairly reliable too. And it will also work fine without any modern cruft on top. You really don't need spf, dkim, dmarc or any of that, for your personal e-mails to be delivered.

Kinda unfortunate that others sometimes block you when you're starting out just based on your IP address [range], so it's discouraging, but it mostly works after a while.

> Big providers are not reliable either. It's a symetrical problem. If they don't deliver messages, they are not reliable from both sender and recipient PoV.

It's symmetric in the sense that if Alice can't communicate with Bob, then Bob can't communicate with Alice. But network effects break the symmetry. If you have a big provider you can reliably communicate with 99.99% of people. If you have a small provider you can reliably communicate with 95% of people.

*Numbers made up to illustrate the point.

My use case is also to receive e-mails from non gmail/outlook users. In fact if I check my logs 1.5% of messages came from google's smtp service and 1 from outlook, out of last 15000 emails.

So if big provider drops 95% of incomming emails from non-big providers into black void, their service is less than useless to me, and their quality would be at par with small providers that can deliver 95% emails successfully.

Haven't have any issues. "You can't self host email" is the bad HN meme.