[EveYoung]

For me, thinking about potential deliverability issues is just too stressful. Even if it works 99% of the time, who knows how important the remaining 1% of emails will be. Personally, having control over my own domain is a good-enough middle ground.

[noduerme]

Been doing this long enough that I can sense right away if people aren't getting my emails. It's not great to call people up and ask if they got an email, and admit that my mail might not be getting through today, but it's not terrible. Gives me a chance to touch base with them for a minute, since I was emailing them anyway.

Having people whitelist you on google / yahoo / msn because you explicitly ask them to does have a wider effect, as far as I can tell, of keeping your emails in the clear for everyone else.

[defanor]

But there's no deliverability guarantee with such a setup either. AIUI the premise of this thread is that the chances of delivery are higher with it, which may be the case (especially taking into account possibilities of misconfiguration on the sender's side), but that's precisely what made me to wonder about a survey/statistics once again: I wonder whether there's actually an observable difference.