This of course is nonsense. It takes some effort to host your own, but you can do it, and there are hundreds of email providers out there. And there is the middle ground of getting your own domain and “hosting” your own for $6/month with Microsoft 365 for example…

From the discussions here on HN the challenge doesn’t seem to be hosting your own so much as getting other mail providers to allow your email.

Receiving is easy. Sending is much harder than it used to be.

I recall reading here a guy complaining that self hosted emails we're super prone to blocking because they didn't come from a reputable Domain/address, and weren't whitelisted from some of the big guys

Which is kind of the problem, if you need to be approved by the Big guys, there's not much of a point of calling open and fair

You still can host for sure, but the moment M$/Gmail, blocks you, you've lost contact with half the people

IP and ASN reputation really matters, as does having SPF, DMARC, DKIM and Email Feedback Loop (FBL) properly configured.

That being said, there are production mail servers on OVH (bad reputation mail wise) that deliver plenty of mail to Microsoft, Google and Apple mail servers every day.

I've hosted my own email server for almost a decade now.

My DNS provider offers a free email account for your domain, but that's the easy way.

I rent a VPS for like $15/yr and run everything myself. Setting up an email server takes like half an afternoon if you follow a good tutorial.

I can't say that Gmail being the biggest provider has had any effect on my email server. I'm not really sure how it would, apart from Google deciding to block private email servers somehow.

could you link to a good tutorial?