There isn't? My Eastern European highschool had self hosted email since as far as I can remember hosted on some pentium PCs.
The issue isn't that there's no alternative, the issue is that, schools are unable or unwilling to bother doing things themselves and instead just go with Apple, Google, Microsoft, because it's easy and almost free.
The major issue is that it's so centralised already that everything outside of the oligopoly is considered untrusted, but it doesnt take long to get trusted- even if you run marketing campaigns over email like I did for years in the mid 2010's.
I'm not sure if we're all collectively incompetent or if we're completely overblowing how difficult it is.
granted; while I managed email systems of various sizes... yeah I outsource it now myself; but that's MAINLY because I'm lazy, I don't want to deal with it and I don't have an obligation on those emails to preserve privacy or anything like that.
if it was my job to do that because there is a risk to the company; sure, not a big deal, sanitise some IPs slowly over time, configure your PTR records, DMARC/DKIM and SPF everything, ensure you're not an open relay and you probably have to look at it once a month for an hour or two to make sure you're not on a blacklist. -- people do this all the time (or used to) with active directory.
Yeah, its stateful and your deliverability is affected by idiots sending spam-like things, but it's not "hard".
Collective (learned) helplessness here is really going to fuck us over, we already forgot how to run servers it seems, now we're not even able to host services.. soon we won't know how to write code, I'm sure.
Sure, it's definitely easier when you have _users_ sending mail. When you have _customers_, it gets a tad more complicated. Sure, you can be a good kid and keep IP's warmed up, set up authentication and make sure DNS is configured properly. None of those help when some spammers decide they like your hosting service and start purchasing accounts with stolen credit cards, nor when you have customers re-using passwords, refusing to use 2FA and so on, and their accounts inevitably get hijacked.
Office 365 and Gmail silently dropping mails doesn't make things easier.
I agree with this 100%. It's bad and I think partially because at least as far as I know, there is no standard definition of how you'd need to setup your email server to guarantee some arbitrary email delivery success rate. And so it ends up being a combination of arcane knowledge together with slow feedback loop for debugging.
btw, if you have any good resources recommendations for successful configuration, I'd love to take a look at that.
The real fun starts after things are set up, as you start wrestling with deliverability issues, trying to get recipients to mark your mails as not spam, trying to avoid recipients to mark properly delivered mails as spam, while simultaneously making sure you prevent your systems from sending spam through hijacked accounts and loopholes.
But giving up? No, definitely not. It's quite doable, but not as straightforward as it ought to be.
In reality, the concern seems to be the law will not legally allow them to continue operating unless Google clarifies where the data is processed.
It's not "clarify where the data is processed" but rather "make sure it's not processed by an US-owned corp" (not to say that any other country is fine, their laws must be compatible with GDPR).