Hacker News Reader

There's a good middlespace here, where you pay someone for email service who isn't an adtech company. Sure, you don't host it yourself, but someone who's not selling you is and you're their actual customer. (I pay FastMail, personally.)

I think you are still being sold even if you pay. Nothing really stops that. Even if they give away or even pay the bigger providers they are ultimately selling a white list. Since if they just accepted whoever gave them money with zero policing of abuse, even a warning and take down system for spam then nobody would accept their whitelist as it eventually becomes a blacklist of "the one spammers use" and their business model essentially becomes a scam.

That's the cost of not pushing the cost on those responsible: the spammers

There's some setup cost, for sure. But there need not be that much of an ongoing maintenance (for me, it's just pacman -Syu + restart of some services, perhaps 10mins a month). You can also gain some interesting features and insight as a result.