> There's a lot of FUD around how mail is "hard", but it's much less complicated than, say, running and maintaining a k8s cluster
The main difference is that you're fully in control of the k8s cluster, but no matter what you do, you don't have control over the email infrastructure, because deliverability depends on the receiver. On every receiver you send to.
People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know? Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.
Meh, one could also complain they don't have control over backbone networks, transit, peering agreements, and intermediary routing therefore hosting a service on k8s is futile without using a managed provider / PaaS.
> People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know?
Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..
> Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.
> intermediary routing therefore hosting a service on k8s is futile without using a managed provider / PaaS.
Except that a managed service doesn't solve that for you. They are no better at that than you are. Email services are better at deliverability than you are, because they spend lots of time building their IP reputations and more importantly negotiating with mail providers to guarantee their emails show up.
> Because people reply to my emails.. because I email documents to family/friends/landlord/etc and they receive it as expected..
I'm guessing you don't confirm every email you send with every person though.
> Of course they do, this is what DMARC is for.
I was involved in the creation of DMARC (and SPF and DKIM) so I know how it's supposed to work, but in the real world, most providers do not honor the "reject" flag and actually send the bounces. Last time I dealt with it was a few years ago, maybe it's better now.
For context, I started my career at Sendmail, and I worked on the SPF and DKIM specs, so I've dealt with deliverability for 25+ years. I also ran my own mail server until around 2009. But I switched to Gmail as my primary around 2008, when deliverability just got too hard. But I still worked on commercial deliverability for years after that.
Granted, SPF and DKIM wasn't widely adopted at that point (and DMARK didn't exist), so maybe it's easier now. But at the same time, most of AWS/Azure/GCP are marked as bad automatically, as well as most home internet blocks.
So if you want to run your own mail server, you can't do it on your home router anymore, you have to rent a server in a rack and get a clean IP that's just for you. That costs $$$.
The main difference is that you're fully in control of the k8s cluster, but no matter what you do, you don't have control over the email infrastructure, because deliverability depends on the receiver. On every receiver you send to.
People say "I don't have deliverability problems!" but how do you know? Most places don't tell you they rejected your email.