There are good reasons to use a third-party mail server, IMHO. (I recently made that decision again.)

But the reader should be aware that these writeups of how to do X often involve the writer/publisher getting referral kickbacks from the commercial service they're describing.

I'm about to be in a position of doing something like those writeups, as a microstartup, and I'm not entirely comfortable with the affiliate programs. But the companies monetizing with privacy-invading ubiquitous profiling trackers (sometimes euphemistically called "showing ads" and "analytics"), and otherwise selling personal data, have spoiled most potential willingness of readers to pay for content. So, affiliate programs with an obvious potential conflict of interest is the only way I've thought of to fund the work.

I have been following Derek for a long time and know that he is not doing this for profit.

More info if interested: https://sive.rs/trust

As in my case, there's a potential conflict of interest with the affiliate programs. In his case, he has an interest in funding the trust for charitable purposes and maybe for his 5% drawdown.

I was going to mention this almost sounds like a vultr ad, but woah that's a really clever way to go about selling a company.

Can you even host your own SMTP server in 2023 without it being shadow-blocklisted by default? What's your experience?

Yes, you can do it!

Yup. Been running my own for past two decades, still works.

Probably the reason its working is because its been running for two decades.

It's fine until Yahoo hellbans you with no recourse for 6 months after sending you a cryptic message in an SMTP response to visit a form and fill it in which you do to the best of your ability. Oh and inevitably there's always someone you need to email on Yahoo.

True but at this point if you don’t do that most e-mail servers will reject you.

Spam pretty much destroyed e-mail as an actually open protocol. Spam destroys all open systems.

Deliverability from a cloud host IP is not going to be good.

Is this really the issue that it used to be, though? I'm curious if I'm the only person who just doesn't send email much anymore in my personal life.

Yes, I get a lot of email. But it's almost all transactional or subscription. The number of emails I send or receive with other humans is pretty dang low. Most institutions these days require using their platform for communications. Most people I care about who I communicate with electronically I do over SMS or Signal or occasionally a Mastodon message.

I still own the domain, so I could easily pick up up and move to a different mail service in probably just several minutes of setting up an account and changing some DNS values. So while not fully independent, the time spent getting outbound email right is going to have less impact than other changes I could make.

You're still independent of any given service. Outgoing mail is effectively stateless at this scale so the cost to switch to a different one us ~zero.

My previous version of https://sive.rs/ti (until a few hours ago) used the built-in OpenSMTPD server for outgoing email.

But then Vultr.com is not un-blocking port 25 by request anymore.

That's why I had to switch to a SMTP service.