I know it's going to be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but my opinion is that email is one of the things that most businesses shouldn't run themselves.
- Email is hard to get right. There are many subtle configuration mistakes you can make, and it's pretty hard to detect those mistakes (hence one of the reasons why I started Mailhardener)
- Your users will have high expectations. For email to be used effectively users expect email to work on many devices, have a webmail client, calendar integration, a good search function, good spam detection, infinite backups, ability to have huge attachments, etc, etc.
- Your spam filter is never going to be as effective as that of the big email services. They have ML based spam filters that are constantly evolving. Even if you were to have access to their ML models, you wouldn't have enough data to effectively train that model.
- Hosted email solutions are almost always more cost effective, regardless of the size of organisations. Running and maintaining an email service is labour intensive.
Of course, there are also many legit use cases where you want to run your own email server. But for >99% of organisations, it just won't make any sense to run their own email.
> - Email is hard to get right. There are many subtle configuration mistakes you can make, and it's pretty hard to detect those mistakes (hence one of the reasons why I started Mailhardener)
It's not that hard if I've done it right. ;-)
Jokes aside, yes, it's a bit overwhelming at the beginning, but I don't find it that cumbersome to keep it running. That is, it wouldn't be if Google was not actively being malicious in this regard.
> - Your users will have high expectations. For email to be used effectively users expect email to work on many devices, have a webmail client, calendar integration, a good search function, good spam detection, infinite backups, ability to have huge attachments, etc, etc.
From my experience, these aren't that hard to set up.
If you're a corporation, your users are your employees. This is a bit different than if you were an email hosting company where users were paying for your product. In the former case, it is your responsibility to handle this well to serve the company's needs. It either serves you well or it does not.
> - Your spam filter is never going to be as effective as that of the big email services. They have ML based spam filters that are constantly evolving. Even if you were to have access to their ML models, you wouldn't have enough data to effectively train that model.
I'm not convinced by this argument. As others have stated, I've also had very bad experiences with Gmail's spam filtering. It has a very high false positive rate which often makes email go unnoticed until it's too late. I have a basic SpamAssassin setup for my self-hosted email and it works marvelously. It very rarely lets spam through and I haven't had a single false positive yet.
> But for >99% of organisations, it just won't make any sense to run their own email.
Perhaps, but the solution is decidedly not going to the monopolist. Hiring an email hosting company instead of doing it yourself is reasonable, though.
