[franga2000]

It's also expensive compared to rolling my own. Using the standard plan, I'd be paying 200$/y for just a single address for each of my family members. Personally, I want at least 2 myself. Compare that to the ~120$/y I pay for my main VPS which has plenty of spare resources to handle not only my family's email, but also for some clients AND, since I make the rules, I also don't need services like Sendgrid for sending email from my websites. All well worth the 5-10 afternoons a year spent maintaining it.

[cflee]

That is really great if you don't have any outbound deliverability issues due to IP reputation on a VPS host! Under those circumstances, that sounds like a great arrangement.

I think that is not quite the norm, lots of these hosts (and home internet connections) tend to have rather bad reputations, and chasing down the various RBLs can get really old really fast, especially since the most common response is to silently blackhole so you don't get a bounce.

[danpalmer]

This might be what you mean, but I believe they charge by inboxes, not by addresses. I have lots of addresses, but a single inbox (which I use rules to file within), and that is relatively cheap.

I used to run my own email server, but found it difficult to get things like push email working reliably, and had a couple of issues with deliverability of emails.