[chappie7]

Using a cloud provider with your own domain means going through a lot of the “hard” parts, yes (setting DNS records for DMARC/DKIM/SPF/MX mostly). But self hosting does provide benefits on top of that.

Hosting your own MX (the receive side) means a lot of private emails go straight to you: purchase receipts, utility bills, travel itineraries. You can have as many users/mailboxes/aliases as you like without having to pay more. You also get confidence that emails sent to you didn’t get silently treated as spam (cloud providers have disappeared enough 2FA code emails that I really care about this).

Sending emails directly also provides some benefits. You can guarantee that the email is sent with TLS, for example. Having logs to prove that my server sent a message and it was received and acknowledged by the receiving server has been useful to me a couple of times too.