[wpietri]

Yup. Spam is the root problem. With an enormous amount of complexity between that and the mail admin's day to day experience.

I hosted my own mail for more than 20 years. A couple years back I just got tired of trying to solve deliverability puzzles, plus the fears that deliverability issues generate. (E.g., "Did that potential employer get my email about the job?") Especially since some of the puzzles are not solvable, like why GMail does what it does. I even had friends at Google, and I still couldn't find out why GMail occasionally didn't like my server. And arguably, that's the right choice for them, as the more spammers know about how they work, the worse it is for Google staff and GMail users.

For me, switching to Fastmail hosting was a big win. It's not like I'm out of technical challenges to solve, but I get to apply that to things where the upside is greater than, "The thing everybody expects to work still works."

[clairity]

the spam problem advantages google, as your own story illustrates, so it's unlikely they'd really want to help solve deliverability/spam issues systemicly. making personal email hosting more difficult means they have a chance to capture your email data streams via gmail. whether you switch there or not, it creates a pressure for most to aggregate on gmail, which means they can see most email exchanges.

[wpietri]

For sure. Good spam filtering was one big reason for people to switch to GMail. And a lot of people who gave up hosting their own email have switched to Gmail as well. I'm sure this doesn't rise to the level of conspiracy, but there's little incentive for them to fix the broader problems.

[azinman2]

My issue with fast mail et all is storage is so unnecessarily expensive. I have many gigs of email that I don’t want to lose, but I also don’t want to pay many tens of dollars/month to host it.

[maccolgan]

I use SES just for delivering emails while hosting the emails myself. Feels like an optimal solution.

[selcuka]

> I have many gigs of email > don’t want to pay many tens of dollars/month

How many gigs? It appears that the 100GB plan is only $9/mo.

[azinman2]

Whoa. That’s very different from the last time I checked, perhaps they changed either their plans or their structure. I saw it previously as additional storage I’d have to add. 100G would be enough! Wow thank you!

[Aeolun]

Is it? I pay $5 for 50gb, which is many years of email (including all the spam/newsletters, which I really don’t need to keep)

[twobitshifter]

If you have iCloud you have the option of using a custom domain. I think I only pay a few bucks a month.

[azinman2]

For various reasons I’d rather have an indie provider. I’m currently on Google and trying to decentralize my data.

[twobitshifter]

Ok, if the amount of data is a problem, another option is to just download your mbox from Google takeout, treat it as an archive, and use something like notmuch to search your old mails. You can then store and backup the mbox anywhere you want.

In addition to the iCloud, I have a free ProtonMail account, which I use sparingly, and anything large or important that comes in there I move to local backup and delete. 99% of the messages I get can just be deleted. If you set up pop3 you can auto delete from the server. That’s the old school solution, but it depends on your use case. The pop3 option doesn’t work well with multiple devices.

[patrck]

Maybe self-host an IMAP server, and periodically archive from FM to your box/VM?