I think the best option for self-hosters who don’t want too much headache from their email is to host the email yourself, but send your emails through a relay other providers actually trust. It sucks to get so close to full control and give it up, but if you’re like me, you send almost no email, so there’s almost nothing at all to see for the relay, and all your received mail still comes straight to your server.

then you end up on a VPS with a bad spam/RBL reputation because they have other customers being spammy dickheads, and their entire IP allocation is listed.

Sure, if you don’t do your own research and legwork, first.

In fact, there are a shitton more bad corners you can paint yourself into if you are too fucking lazy to do some trivially basic research ahead of time, from hosts to software chosen to how you configure things.

Hell, a lot of these bad corners also involve turnkey solutions hosted by others. So simply having someone else do all the work can hose you just as badly. Sure, Azure/O365 or AWS Workmail or Google Workspace solutions are usually not that kind of corner, but unless you are willing to pay out the nose for minimal needs, you’re usually going to go for something a lot smaller and possibly more sketchy.