[q0uaur]

personally - gmail is extremely plagued by spam. sure it goes into the spam mailbox most of the time, but enough non-spam email goes there too so you still have to check it. the current plague for me is "your package is awaiting delivery" spam - almost daily.

for being considered spam - i've had like 3 irl things set up on my old self-hosted mail, and these 3 arrived, even though while testing shortly after making the setup i did end up in spam. i don't know if companies have a whitelist of "if a user has this email on his account, don't send to spam" or something, but it hasnt been an issue.

i don't usually email too many individuals, in my social circles emails is not for that and has pretty much died long ago.

Due to the decent success i've had, i've spent some time today setting up mox to potentially replace my other solution - it is a bit of a process, many dns entries to make, and DNSSEC in my country seems to only update once a day so i'll see if i can enable it tomorrow, but so far it's working (but as usual, the first test email lands in spam.) i assume delivery will improve as soon as the domain is a bit older - i imagine most big mail services block email from a domain created the same day the mail is sent.

[account42]

Besides actual spam spam, Gmail also gets more random similar-named people giving your address to service providers if you have something like initial + lastname or similar. There are too many "legit" companies that don't implement e-mail verification and just repeatedly send to whatever was provided.