Back in 2010 this was reasonable. Now? Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined. And that's all on top of the already significant burdens to run a non-relay hacker-proof server. There's a lot going on to operate reliable basic services on the Internet today.

> Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined.

Hmm, almost like Google have managed to make non-Google email impossible to do (excepting a few other very large outfits like Microsoft). What a happy accident that the de-facto answer is "give all your email to the advertising company".

This is true. I tried forwarding email going to my domain to Gmail, but it keeps getting flagged as spam despite setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I ended up just setting up a filter to never send email addressed to @mydomain.com as spam and hope SpamAssassin catches most spam before Postfix forwards it.

IIRC you can send your outgoing mail through google too. But I'm not sure — I haven't set up the outgoing part in any way so I can only receive mail on my domain but not send.

Most things are cheaper if you do them yourself. I'm not sure that is much of an argument against what Google is doing.

Isn't it a pain to avoid getting your outgoing emails marked as spam, if you aren't using one of the established providers (google, microsoft, fastmail etc)?

So, what I did for a similar use case:

-Buy domain from name cheap

-Setup email forwarding to my gmail account with namecheap

-Setup gmail to optionally send as [email protected] (I forget the steps, but I think it's under settings -> accounts)

So although the email comes to/from my custom domain, gmail is the real sender so I've not had any trouble with delivery (that I've noticed, at least)

I'm planning a similar setup. Cloudflare now as email forwarding in beta and then use my personal Gmail account to send mail as by custom domain. Here's a tutorial on setting up Gmail's "Send Mail As": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEheS8gM4Xs

I've had issues with Outlook (or whatever Microsoft calls their mail service) placing my emails in the spam folder, so YMMW. Works fine when the receiver is using Gmail, though.

Oh cool, didn't realize that last step was possible with free gmail.