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I keep hearing that, and I keep not knowing what on Earth are people talking about. Are you planning on running a newsletter? Because if not, it's perfectly doable. I wouldn't recommend it because of it's low bang / buck ratio, but it's nowhere near "basically impossible".
I think @gattsuru could dig up the relevant link, but I remember a blogpost from a guy who tried running his own server, only to be sandbagged hard by Gmail and the like.
There's a pretty common issue in the tech community where someone writes a blog post about their experience, and after a long game of telephone a caricatured version of it becomes The Truth. It's been a while since I heard that one, but every once in a while someone still repeats the "98% of programmers can't code FizzBuzz" thing, for example.
I dunno, I played around with self-hosted email, the only time anything landed in spam was when I setup some cronjob that regularly sent mails. Never saw problems with manually sent stuff, and since I almost never send emails as it is, I cannot imagine tripping any spam filters in the course of normal usage.
If you're just trying to receive e-mails, Mail in a Box works pretty well 99% of the time. If you're largely just sending yourself notifications, with an account that's not used anywhere else of significance, it works 98%ish of the time. ((And even that's overkill; a basic postfix relay works.))
If you're trying to send e-mail, it can be messy, and worse unpredictably messy. Mailinabox tries to solve the absolute horror story that mail config turned into, and to be fair a lot of the tedious config-twisting stuff is no longer as frustrating as it once was. You can do it... for a while.
The issue is not that you might send enough e-mail to hit an automated spam filter yourself, or even the risk that you might misconfigure things in a way that a bad actor can abuse -- that's a concern with near-any server, and there's a lot of things like a SIP PBX where you just recognize and mitigate it. With e-mail, however, your domain and/or IP address can end up on sizable DNSBLs because some IP address half an octet away fucked up, or because some sysadmin in Europe had a stick up their ass that day. Surprisingly big-name people can misconfigure their own stuff, and break because you're not big enough to have been made an exception, and not even have reporting turned on: it's happened to me.
E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.
Ok, thank you! That's exactly what I suspected, and not what I'd characterize as "basically impossible".
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