this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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It's like running your own email server in the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.
Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.
Most people will land at a "shared" service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I'm afraid that eventually there might only be "outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com" so to speak, because it's just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.
But people self host email today, and there are many more email orgs around including private work email and specialised services such as Proton mail focusing on privacy and security. It's a good analogy.
An open standard like Mastodon will allow big players but also niche and small players, who can focus on specific communities or offering specific spins.
Do people actually self host mail? I remember watching some conference that said it is basically a full time job nowadays to get your mails actually delivered if you're not one of the big providers. Much easier to pay one of them and just use a custom domain instead, and I can easily see this being a thing for the fediverse one day too (assuming it ever gets big enough)
I selfhost my own email and you are absolutely correct it is musch easier to receive than to send. I use a 3rd party to send all my outgoing mail on my behalf.