[seventhtiger]

It's the same with email for example. I've helped a friend roll out his own server because he doesn't want Google reading his emails.

Fair enough, but you won't get Google's spam filter or availability either, which your privacy was paying for.

[tomatocracy]

I do this. Funnily enough one of the reasons I did it was because Google’s spam filters gave me too many false positives and my gmail account attracted enough spam that sorting through manually was a pain.

[seventhtiger]

Has it been a good experience for you? What are you using?

My point was just that even if something is provided to the customer for free, doesn't mean it's easy to produce. That causes a lot of the issues my non-tech friends have with understanding the scope of work. Just because social media is free and easy to set up as a customer doesn't mean developing a social media is easy at all.

[tomatocracy]

I’ve been using exim and dovecot with rspamd for spam filtering. Have two VPSs on different providers to provide MX backup properly (they’re cheap these days and for low traffic I don’t need much more than the smallest VPS). I do DKIM and SPF but not DMARC and it gets through gmails spam filter fine and passes the various other tests you can find online. Took a while to set up right (in the end I found the best route to predictability to be writing my own exim config file rather than using someone else’s template) but pretty simple to run after that - there’s some effort to make sure I keep up to date with security patches and monitor log files for anything untoward but it’s relatively small. Using letsencrypt certs so email clients have been relatively simple to set up.

Overall it’s been a good experience. I run into a few sites which when I send to them classify my email as spam or grey list my sending IP so mail doesn’t get through quickly but then I used to have the same spam problem with some sites running my own domain through google apps.