https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
I’m sure the email I sent to an academics using proton has gone in the spam. :( too bad
I've been using my selfhosted mailserver on a cheap VPS for a few years with no issues. It took about a week to get DMARC/DKIM/SPF setup right, and then a few back and forth email threads to my email addresses hosted on gmail, yahoo, and M365 allowed me to gain trustworthy status with them.
mind you, I'm the only user of my mailserver, so I'm not worried about other users spamming and getting me on a list.
It's not only self-hosted email that is affected. My main email address is the one attached to my domain, which I've owned for over 20 years, and is managed by my webhosting company, a perfectly respectable, legitimate business that at one point handled about a third of all internet traffic in my country. This company is, nevertheless, not considered trustworthy enough for emails through their servers to reliably be delivered to their destination. I increasingly have to use an email address from a major multinational corporation because the email address from a merely large national corporation only has a 50/50 chance of reaching the recipient.
Email is becoming obsolete anyway. I only use it personally to register accounts online. I have an old email address that I got 20 years ago. I haven't checked it in years. It holds several hundred thousand emails and was constantly full of junk mail. It just became totally useless to me a long time ago.
We use email at work, but not as much as we used to because there are better ways to communicate since everyone has a phone. We don't even use the computers in our offices much anymore because it's just easier to use a phone. The execs have tablets that they carry around, then dock at their desks. They don't even have desktop computers anymore.