I used to own and manage my own mail server when I had to do it for my business back in the day. I had to be up to date in all involved email server management and its perks anyway, so it wasn't a lot of extra work. Now it would be. For a normal email user, it would be a nightmare.
I'm the kind of person who's very disrupted by having a ton of small tasks in the background all the time. Maintaining your own email server adds a bunch of them, even if you are already knowledgeable (keeping your domain(s), storage & redundancy, having to maintain a server with good uptime and with a lot of security concerns - it's online and it broadcasts its IP in headers, it's immediately spotted as running an email server and targeted to be made a spam-relay or worse).
If you're not even knowledgeable about it, the amount of stuff you need to learn and be familiar with is ridiculous. Maybe they don't even occur to you off the top of your head now, but the amount of little things one learns over the years about server maintenance is massive and a lot of it is absolutely necessary to run an email server with guarantees. Having to "insource" all that shit work is something I've been trying to avoid but I'm afraid I will have to do. I rent, this means sometimes I have to move and keeping servers 365/24/7 is a problem. Typical home connections are rather shitty for an email server in terms of uptime - you'd have the occasional email silently not arriving (depending on sender retry config) and also the occasional bounce (server coming back up but not properly - happens) and that doesn't look good for serious communications this day an age. And like that, a large number of concerns both particular and common to each email user.
Having backups (also involves shit work but not as much) mitigates the problem but for some of us, simply to stop receiving email at a certain address for a couple of days can cause a lot of trouble.
I agree with you. There are quite a few commercial webmail/imap/pop providers, though. I've been using one for years now. I refuse to do free email since I lost my yahoo mail over a decade ago, and I like the peace of mind of knowing I can call up some someone for support.
I used to own and manage my own mail server when I had to do it for my business back in the day. I had to be up to date in all involved email server management and its perks anyway, so it wasn't a lot of extra work. Now it would be. For a normal email user, it would be a nightmare.
I'm the kind of person who's very disrupted by having a ton of small tasks in the background all the time. Maintaining your own email server adds a bunch of them, even if you are already knowledgeable (keeping your domain(s), storage & redundancy, having to maintain a server with good uptime and with a lot of security concerns - it's online and it broadcasts its IP in headers, it's immediately spotted as running an email server and targeted to be made a spam-relay or worse).
If you're not even knowledgeable about it, the amount of stuff you need to learn and be familiar with is ridiculous. Maybe they don't even occur to you off the top of your head now, but the amount of little things one learns over the years about server maintenance is massive and a lot of it is absolutely necessary to run an email server with guarantees. Having to "insource" all that shit work is something I've been trying to avoid but I'm afraid I will have to do. I rent, this means sometimes I have to move and keeping servers 365/24/7 is a problem. Typical home connections are rather shitty for an email server in terms of uptime - you'd have the occasional email silently not arriving (depending on sender retry config) and also the occasional bounce (server coming back up but not properly - happens) and that doesn't look good for serious communications this day an age. And like that, a large number of concerns both particular and common to each email user.
Having backups (also involves shit work but not as much) mitigates the problem but for some of us, simply to stop receiving email at a certain address for a couple of days can cause a lot of trouble.