Unfortunately as far as email is concerned this is not so true anymore. Many years ago I used to do as you described but eventually switched to hosted services due to the likelihood of any messages being sent from said self-hosted server being flagged as spam in the best case, or never received in the worst case as you'll receive an undeliverable message due to the sender requirements of many organizations.

As with most nice things the bad actors (spam, phishing, etc.) in society will abuse things to the point that we can no longer have them.