Note that the original post is from a purveyor of commercial email, he probably feels the heat from those artisanal servers.
You can run your own email servers(s) as long as you know what you are doing. Setting up your own is not for the faint of heart. However, cPanel will do the initial setup work. CSF will see to it that your mail server is moderately secure, and that the bots trying to kick down its doors are get banned. Setup of DMARC, SPF, etc increasingly gets automated. Mxtoolbox makes sure that all aspects of DNS and mailservers are correct. Finally, you can send mail to something like analyze.email, and they will score your server. If you score an 8 or better, your email will definitely go through (analyze.email will hand out demerits for NOT having a link in your email, for from and reply being the same, or for a lack of a list-unsubscribe.)
If you run your own business, an own website and email address is important for branding. Gmail sent “on behalf of” does not install a lot of trust.
Here are the downsides to outsourcing your email:
- Who will read your mail sitting on their server?
- Who will give your mail sitting on their server to anyone waving some legal papers?
- Who can kick you off their server without recourse, killing many years of investment into your email identity?
Here are the downsides to rolling your own email server:
- If an evil hacker invades your badly protected server, and uses it for gadzillions of spam, a nicer provider will turn off your outgoing email, a nastier one will null-route you no questions asked. That’s why you should start your career as an artisanal mailhoster on a VPS -- you can always rent another one. It gets nastier when a homelabber decides to do it from home. Hacker invades, Internet provider cancels your account for violation of TOS. You usually don’t have much choice when it comes to a new hardline provider, and it will take a while.
- A big danger are the countless blacklists. It is very hard not to be on any. Some will blacklist whole net blocks if one IP in the block misbehaves. Some are plainly extortionist; they want money for removal. Frankly, they should be taken to court.