Well, I'm actually self-hosting an email server with mailcow for one of my projects and it's been pretty smooth, with minimal maintenance. Just running some upgrade command every once in a while to upgrade the docker container, and attaching a bigger disk when the old one was almost full. The biggest blocker was asking my VPS vendor to open up the port as they'll only open it for customers older than 6 months.
Most of the problems encountered by those people you mentioned are probably because they're running it for other people. You can't control what other people send so you'll eventually get blocklisted when one of your users starts sending spam because their account was hacked.
Yes, sure, self-hosting email can go fine for a long time, depending on the amount of users that you have and what your users do (For example : try bulk email) and whom they want to email with, or send emails to mailing lists, or use email forwarding. The OP wants to run a Lemmy instance and have email out working, probably just for notifications. Using a transactional email provider for the latter seems like a sensible choice to me.
Well, I'm actually self-hosting an email server with mailcow for one of my projects and it's been pretty smooth, with minimal maintenance. Just running some upgrade command every once in a while to upgrade the docker container, and attaching a bigger disk when the old one was almost full. The biggest blocker was asking my VPS vendor to open up the port as they'll only open it for customers older than 6 months.
Most of the problems encountered by those people you mentioned are probably because they're running it for other people. You can't control what other people send so you'll eventually get blocklisted when one of your users starts sending spam because their account was hacked.
Yes, sure, self-hosting email can go fine for a long time, depending on the amount of users that you have and what your users do (For example : try bulk email) and whom they want to email with, or send emails to mailing lists, or use email forwarding. The OP wants to run a Lemmy instance and have email out working, probably just for notifications. Using a transactional email provider for the latter seems like a sensible choice to me.