Yep. You are 100% right about that. It’s the best thing to be independent, but it’s so fucking hard because we’ve all just let these big email providers take away this wonderful system from us.

That’s why I’m super picky about which blocklists I use for my own email service. If a blocklist charges for removing your IP, or even if they make you jump through unreasonable hoops, I refuse to use them.

I also have to check regularly to make sure my own IPs aren’t on any lists. Apple is the worst, because they use a blocklist provider that has terrible communication and service unless you pay a huge subscription fee.

(One point though, it’s not the domain that goes on the blocklist, it’s the IP address of the SMTP server. You can use a custom domain name with most providers, then you’re using their SMTP servers, so their IP addresses. If you’re unhappy with them, it’s pretty easy to switch providers for your domain, then you get to keep the same email addresses.)

Specifically email is not difficult to host because of the technical burdens but because of the black and whitelisting of the big players. Often your server IP address happens to be put on a black list without your fault and then you can write an email to Microsoft or Google and say 'pretty please remove my IP address from your blacklist' and they just don't answer because they're swamped with requests like that and they need to check each one manually or something and then suddenly you can't email to 80% of the email addresses in the world for months.

Yeah, you can rent a virtual host and set up an email server on it. You gotta make sure port 25 is unblocked, which sometimes requires payment (Azure charges for it). Otherwise, you’d wanna look for a specific email hosting provider. You also would need to make sure the public IP you get isn’t on any spam lists, which can be a huge pain in the butt.

On my service, I specifically don’t use any spam lists that you have to pay to get off of, but a lot of places do (like Apple iCloud).