Running a mail server which receives mail is easy. Getting your e-mails delivered can be more difficult. But so far (I have been running a personal e-mail server since 2007), I have gotten most of my e-mails delivered.

It's no longer your job to deliver emails. Just use a delivery service like SendGrid, SES, etc.

It can be if you want to. But yeah, businesses probably want to pay someone for it. And many ISPs will do it for their customers as well.

It's pretty much out of your control. If the server you rented has a tainted IP reputation, you're done for. Instead of cycling through to get the good IP, which isn't too easy to tell, you should just use a proxy service.

If you're on a small scale, those 2 services I mentioned aren't going to cost you much (free and maybe about 5 cents a month.)

I even proxy my hobby personal domain server because I don't want my personal mails get buried in people's junk folder.

If you are alright with running a single piece app that provides webmail, SMTP, POP, and REST, you might be interested in my project: http://www.inbucket.org/

It's really targeted for intranet use though, I wouldn't recommend exposing anything other than the SMTP port to the internet.

I am using https://www.maskmail.net/ and it provides this functionality without having to run our own infra :)

> writing code to call APIs from email providers

Doesn't strike me as much easier than running a local email daemon to receive email, TBH.

I ran my email infrastructure before but deemed it too much hassle. I would rather offline the burden to a service provider.

When I say "writing code", it would be more or less like the newmail script here. Much simpler than running a full fledge email infrstructure. :-)