Even for a lot of technical folks, the maintenance is a hassle. My anecdata: almost all of the technically capable folks I know who could maintain their own email server choose to outsource it. For the average Internet user it's outright impossible. Even if it only took "3-person days a year" for maintenance, the mountain of experience required to be capable of the setup just isn't there. Not to mention the stress and hassle of dealing with attackers, software upgrades, outages of various sorts, etc. And that pain tends to be multiplied by the number of services maintained.
In this light, perhaps tools like Docker are quite a bit more interesting. We might imagine a scenario where the maintenance itself is the product, not dissimilar to automatic updates on Apple's App Store. You buy a "cloud app", which is installed on your server (or cloud instances) in a container, receives auto-updates provided by the vendor. Purchase and configuration is handled by apps on mobile and/or web.
There a ton of potential wrinkes in this idea, and certainly some services (e.g. web search) wouldn't adapt into to this model... but it would be pretty neat to see even a partial shift to services-as-apps.
In the end, you have to make the tough choice between whether you want to make a controlled, voluntary disclosure of your private information (e-mail text and metadata) to Google, or risk an uncontrolled, involuntary disclosure of that private information to potentially malicious actors.
My hope is that we'll get some technological infrastructure solutions to this quandry through the next generation of privacy-preserving communications protocols that are currently being worked out (Tox, BitMessage, Flowingmail, etc - not endorsing any of these, just examples of the current crop). Even then, it'll be a while before we can securely protect both our data and metadata.
Eg., set up an alias that forwards to gmail and do your best to make sure spam doesn't get forwarded to gmail and put your entire server on their blacklist? Probably you didn't do good enough.
The only frustrating part is that I generally don't get to choose when those 3 days happen—most all time spent is putting out fires. But then again that's sysop life in general…
Wow, that's way worse than I would have guessed.
If your salary is $100,000 a year, and you work 40-hour weeks for roughly 50 weeks a year, that's the equivalent of $1,200.
I can't imagine spending $1,200 a year just to run my own mail server. The costs vastly outweigh the benefits. Especially considering that I'm far more likely to screw up all the rest of the security involved.
Also, my quoted 3 man days is a huge guess. I don't keep track of that stuff. It's 15 minutes or an hour here and there...
$20/year gets you decent email.
You can't escape by leaving on your own; you'd need to spur others to mass exodus.
Not my experience. It took ages to get a satisfactory setup (based on Debian's default config), but I've rarely had to touch it since. Admittedly I'm not exactly zero tolerance on spam.
Actually, sadly, my experience is the other way around. Setting up mail server is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work, and you always have to wonder whether this time the mail will arrive, or whether some server on the way is going to have a bad day and drop your email without telling anyone. And of course, since it's your mail, everyone assume you're the one at fault.
At least, that's how it worked few years ago, but I don't think the situation got better. Some things only get worse.