[xoa]

My biggest issue with hosted email for awhile was the disconnect that has developed between how most services now seem to bill and how over the now many decades (yeesh!) I've ended up using email. I have my own domains, on a technical level mailboxes ("accounts") are effectively free. So I've used them freely for separating usage (servers and services can all have their own accounts for emailing me notifications, I can use "[e-mail]" for financial institutions, etc. For my own servers/services in particular it's good that they have their own isolated email accounts with their own passwords or keys and no ability to spam the world, only email me. It also makes it really easy to use white lists and ensure hard barriers and rules for important stuff so that even if an email address leaks it's irrelevant, and irrelevant in a deterministic manner. I still of course have general addresses that must accept traffic from the world and thus have to worry about spam, but a lot of the most key stuff where I never want to miss a message is from a pretty small circle.

All the typical recommended services though tend to treat mailboxes as the same thing as a person, charging an entire new fee for every single one, and then have hacks like aliases or catch-alls on top. Obviously that works for most and if you're setting up a new workflow can go with that and use other mechanisms for notifications, but for me changing at this point would be brutal. Self-hosted + relay (Amazon SES) works ok though.

That said, I've discovered two nice services (Migadu and MXroute, probably there are more out there somewhere) that charge along my own usage model. Migadu I think has been featured on HN before, and it seems solid. You can make arbitrary accounts under your domain as you wish, the charge is for storage and outgoing mail. So I'm now hybrid, and I could see that making me lazy enough to switch entirely. But I still think knowing how to do it yourself isn't a bad thing, there's some empowerment in having the fallback and remembering how it all works underneath. If nothing else as part of self-hosting you can run your own notifications through it.