What about the numerous other email providers?

The numerous other email providers are... numerous. Every discussion like this ignores, to an absurd extent, how hard it is for non-tech people to gather information on these topics and make an informed choice: Information about which email providers are care about which aspects of privacy, which aspects of privacy and information security even exists, which email providers even exist, what they are doind with your data, what parts of what they are doing is a problem...

You can't even ask tech people to make a choice for you because they all say different things.

Other domains like cars, medicine, construction, whatever have established standards because they have recognized that individuals simply _cannot_ make an informed choice, even if they want. I'm eager to say that only information technology likes to call the user "unwilling" and "lazy" instead, but actually individuals from other domains do that too. Luckily, the established standards are mandatory, so their opinion doesn't count.

Rounding error that doesn't matter, because the recipients of any e-mail sent from those providers are likely on mailboxes backed by Google or MSFT anyway.

> self hosting email is notoriously difficult

Yet people do it anyway. It's not an impossible task like you're making out.

The act of hosting postfix/dovecot is not in itself difficult. Debugging deliverability issues is, though. And it's time-consuming.

The greatest trick the centralised email services ever pulled is convincing people that a faulty spam filter is the sender's problem.

And doesn't change anything I said at all.

It kinda does, though. It's why I stopped self-hosting. I bet if you emailed my gmail address it wouldn't come through, even through no fault of your own.

You can have DMARC, SPF and DKIM all correctly configured on a clean IP and some mail server at Microsoft will still drop your mails because it's having a hard day and it feels like it.

You can also route outbound email through an existing place like smtp2go.com, which stops all of that outbound hassle. :)

That place in particular (which I use and can recommend) even have a (permanent?) free tier. ;)

This makes it something that the average person cannot do; you're suggesting something that already requires more time and resources than 75% of the population has access to.

If you're serious about this than go talk to a non-tech person and tell them to self-host email and see how they do. Look at their challenges, build a solution and then offer it.

Please don't try changing the goal posts by introducing "non-tech" people into this.

That's not at all what the conversation is about, and routing through an external place removes a whole bunch of hassle compared to setting up and maintaining outbound email.

You might not like it for some reason, but that's on you.

If you need a third party to deliver your mail on your behalf, are you really self hosting?

What's the point? At that stage you've already conceded the deliverability problem so now you're just wasting time administrating dovecot and keeping up with security patches.

> If you need a third party to deliver your mail on your behalf, are you really self hosting?

Obviously yes. Not sure why you're trying to pretend otherwise.

Good luck with that. ;)

This is a lie created by webmail providers. There is nothing difficult in self hosting email, abd ensuring email delivery.