Unfortunately, there are other costs associated with running than just "a half-decent vps"... IN addition your vps probably has to be better than you expect. For example, ramnode ($20/year) does not give near enough ram to run anti-spam (e.g. amavisd or just clamav solo). You need on the order of a gig of ram. You won't get that for less than $5/mo or $50/year.
You also must buy an ssl cert or else many other email providers will mark your email spam score up.
You also must go through the operational burdon of setting things up and managing backups, restores, etc. This is perhaps 30 hours / year, which means you're already well over the cost of $40/yr.
One thing to note is that for more than a few accounts (bring your own address, catchall, many aliases) you're unlikely to find something that costs as little as $40/year and the cost of running that yourself is identical, so that's where you can start to make money.
I've gone down the route of using hosted and hosting my own mail and feel like I have a good understanding of the costs.
Your flippant remark, completely disregarding even the system requirements, shows that you have not. Good day sir.
What the hell is wrong with you? The 'if it were android' bit just shows how completely Apple has made us expect the web to not be open. The whole fucking point of web standards is that it doesn't matter what you browse from - if they were conformed to. But no, apple violates them every which way (and gets praised for not being the shittastic company it is to boot) and fucktards like you just accept that 'sure, apple doesn't have to write standards-complient code which will work on competing devices'.
People like you are directly responsible for the horrible state of the web. Every time you make a comment like this you undermine the openness of the web and further catapult us towards the dictator-state where Apple creates concentration camps for open-source software developers and, eventually, users. Do you use any open source software? SInce you have an ipad, probably not. You probably shouldn't even be on this website considering it's "hacker news", not "hipster fuckhead who has a shiny but useless tablet that leads to the fall of all hackers news". People like you are the reason I'm considering leaving this site.
You also must buy an ssl cert or else many other email providers will mark your email spam score up.
You also must go through the operational burdon of setting things up and managing backups, restores, etc. This is perhaps 30 hours / year, which means you're already well over the cost of $40/yr.
One thing to note is that for more than a few accounts (bring your own address, catchall, many aliases) you're unlikely to find something that costs as little as $40/year and the cost of running that yourself is identical, so that's where you can start to make money.
I've gone down the route of using hosted and hosting my own mail and feel like I have a good understanding of the costs.
Your flippant remark, completely disregarding even the system requirements, shows that you have not. Good day sir.