> However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.

>And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.

This is what keeps me away from self-hosting it, though. As long as there's some possibility that my ability to deliver email could get nuked, all because someone else made a mistake, it's not worth it to me, especially since using / sending email is mandatory for doing most things. I guess I'm just not really willing to take that sort of risk

Blacklisting is a shady practice, unfortunately. They generally work on ranges and you don’t get much of a say. Most blacklist maintainers have a way for you to report a false positive. Responsiveness varies. Most maintainers will drop your range off the blacklist after a fixed period.

Or you can pay to get off the list.

Not all email services use blacklists anyway. Bit of a racket.

You can mitigate against it by hosting on a dedicated IP.

But I understand the risk. It’s really annoying when I send someone an email and they call me some days later wondering why I hadn’t sent them an email. Failures are often silent on the sending side.

It’s not for everyone. There are risks.