Ask HN: What's your email setup?
I&#x27;ve run my own email server since the mid 1990s. While it&#x27;s not trivial, it&#x27;s certainly not all that difficult. What I find strange and suspicious, though, is how quickly and readily people go out of their way to actively discourage others, and how there&#x27;s this crazy push to move everyone and everything in to the &quot;cloud&quot;. This even happens in places where running one&#x27;s own email server is expected, such as the selfhosted reddit channel.<p>There are two problems with that, broadly speaking. One, if we care about privacy and security, the &quot;cloud&quot; doesn&#x27;t have that. Google can genuinely try all they want to keep things secure, but we know without doubt, thanks to Mr. Snowden, that people who actually work for TLA agencies are working at Google (and Amazon, and Microsoft, and Yahoo, et cetera). So is our data REALLY safe? Even if they&#x27;re not interested in our data specifically, the data can&#x27;t be said to be safe.<p>The other problem is that email with Gmail and others is not deterministic. In the real world of email, you either get an email or you don&#x27;t. If you don&#x27;t, you can look at your logs and see why. You&#x27;ll end up with a precise reason why delivery failed. With Gmail and friends, though, they might simply not like the choice of subject, or they might not like the attached picture, or they may simply not like the cut of the sending server&#x27;s jib. I&#x27;ve been told that access to email logs for businesses is better than it used to be, but do you think a user who gets free Gmail gets to know why a specific email wasn&#x27;t delivered?<p>Finally, I think Gmail accounts shouldn&#x27;t be usable for WHOIS and for abuse addresses because they can&#x27;t accept abuse complaints. I consider any WHOIS or any Internet service provider which uses Gmail to be amateurish and unprofessional. There&#x27;s nothing less professional than setting up an email for incoming abuse complaints that filters abuse complains.