There’s work being done on it, but from my understanding, it’s slow going…

I use a relatively low spec KVM VPS on another continent. Remember, kids, if all your backups are in one location, you don’t have backups. You have copies.

Man, I wish self hosted email was a reasonable thing to do. But it’s a pain to set up the server and the domain stuff, and once you do, if anyone ever spammed off that IP, you’re probably screwed anyway because good luck getting off the blacklists.

If it was worth stressing about, it was worth discussing with me when I was on the clock. The entire premise of a job is that I work in direct exchange for money. No money? No work. Pay me or wait until next shift.

So it seems like if you’re using Office on desktop, not SaaS, but they do offer it in a browser, so would that count? Technically, if it’s in JavaScript or something like that, computing is handled locally, but it still feels close enough to count.

These apps aren’t SaaS, but their alternatives are in at least some cases. LibreOffice competes with Microsoft Office, for example, and Microsoft wants people to pay a subscription for it, although I think you can still buy it outright. Pretty sure I’ve heard similar for Adobe products. Not super familiar with all the options, so can’t say if it’s true for all of them.

Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.

Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.

Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.