How I accidentally learned email infrastructure while trying to avoid a SendGrid bill

Why am I paying for this when I can host it myself? The hidden subscription fee: your time and your RAM The moment I realized SendGrid wasn't expensive That day, I learned how spammers ruined SMTP for everyone else The day I realized my mail server needed adult supervision The code I didn't plan to write If you have ever worked on a side project or an open source project, you probably know that feeling. You spend hours trying to reduce costs, comparing providers, looking for ways to save at least one dolar more. But not becouse you have to, becouse that thought of paying for something, you may probably host yourself for free feel offensive. That exacly how i ended with my own self-hosted mail server. Why am I paying for this when I can host it myself? Before I started working on it, i thought it couldn't be that hard. I probably only need to buy a server to store data, add a simple Nginx1 config, buy a domain, and set up a few common DNS records2. After all, I ju