Probably preaching to the choir, but ... I just read this: I observe the same thing. Running your own mail server gets harder and harder. And there's a very dangerous aspect to it: Concentration of power. The more people use one of the really big e-mail providers, the more power they get. This allows them to treat e-mail sent by other providers differently. If pretty much anyone uses $BigCompany, then $BigCompany can adjust their spam filter: If a mail has not been sent by $SomeOtherBigCompany, or better, $BigCompany itself, then it is much more likely to be spam, right? Right? Of course not, but they do it anyway. This quickly turns into a marketing argument: "Look, *our* mail services are reliable! All those small companies and all those guys running their own servers, they all have delivery problems!" Yes, of course, because $BigCompany likes it that way ... A few years back, $BigCompany couldn't afford to drop mail sent by other providers. Now they can. This pushes even more people to $BigCompany. Stop it. Don't use $BigCompany or $SomeOtherBigCompany. Run your own server or choose one of the small, independent providers. The more people do it, the better for everyone. (I don't like getting into politics, but this really grinds my gears.) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ... but then again: I have an old account for one of those big mail providers. Didn't log in for quite some time. Now I did and what did I see: Quite a lot of mails in the "Spam" folder -- but they were newsletters *from the mail provider itself*. Maybe their spam filters are just stupidly aggressive. Who knows.