Don't do #1 if you want to reliably accept or send mail. Fun for experimenting/learning, though.
Also, you can buy your own domain, and have Google merely act as the SMTP relay and temporary storage. They can also forward your mail to another server for you.
While there are pain points when it comes to hosting your own mail, it isn't nearly as difficult as you make it.
It gets more difficult if you are providing a service that has to have uptime guarantees or are providing mail to many users but if you take the time to learn and educate yourself on current standards, hosting your own mail for fun and for profit is a doable thing that more developers and admins should do.
We are at a time when we actually have relatively easy to use software to managing mail servers, so us it.
For what it is worth, I have not had problems with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or domains that use their services whether it comes to sending or receiving. Sometimes a server is stuck in an SPAM prevention queue or I might have to whitelist a particularly silly server, but that doesn't happen very often.
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Don't do #1 if you want to reliably accept or send mail. Fun for experimenting/learning, though.
Also, you can buy your own domain, and have Google merely act as the SMTP relay and temporary storage. They can also forward your mail to another server for you.
I'm gonna disagree with you. I've run my own mail server for my primary email for years and very rarely have any issues.
While there are pain points when it comes to hosting your own mail, it isn't nearly as difficult as you make it.
It gets more difficult if you are providing a service that has to have uptime guarantees or are providing mail to many users but if you take the time to learn and educate yourself on current standards, hosting your own mail for fun and for profit is a doable thing that more developers and admins should do.
We are at a time when we actually have relatively easy to use software to managing mail servers, so us it.
For what it is worth, I have not had problems with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or domains that use their services whether it comes to sending or receiving. Sometimes a server is stuck in an SPAM prevention queue or I might have to whitelist a particularly silly server, but that doesn't happen very often.