From my own experience I can tell you that running your own mail server is a massive PITA. There's a good chance that even if you jump through all the required hoops to improve trust for your domain you will still have trouble delivering mail to certain addresses (Hotmail is notoriously hard to get white-listed for).
Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside.
As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.
If it's just deliverability that's an issue, you can use the regular Gmail SMTP server for outgoing mail, without Google Apps. You just have to add the address you're sending from as an alternate address in Gmail.
>Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering.
You could sign up for Google Apps, point your domain MX to Google and forward all your SPAM free mail to your private server from the Google Apps console.
No kidding, I've seen so many companies that had their mail systems in premises setup a 1 user Google Apps account ($50/year) to do what I just mentioned above. They got rid of most of their SPAM and saved tons $ on wasted bandwidth.
Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside.
As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.