For the first time in ... probably two decades ... I am not self-hosting the email for insom.me.uk.

It's gotten too hard to self host, especially for a couple of hobby domains. This makes me sad because email is often (rightly) held up as the original federated protocol on the Internet -- but I think that the reality is that the bar is now quite high.

Anyone _can_ run an SMTP and an IMAP server -- that part isn't too hard (although it could be easier). But having other mail servers trust your email? That's the hard part. More art than science. Part magic. Part capitalism.

My email is not very important to me, but enough mails have arrived hours after they were sent, or landed in people's spam boxes or were outright rejected, that it's finally become enough of a pain that I'm just going to pay someone to deal with it for me.

[ I still very, very strongly believe you should own your own domain on the Internet, if you're going to tie your identity to an email address -- that's maybe the only thing I've really learned in my time online! ]