Absolutely true, and I wouldn't argue against hosting your own email is there are such very specific constraints on your organization. We don't have any of that, and hosting our own email makes zero sense for us.
Or to put it another way... we're a 2 person, self-funded, bootstrapped startup. Our most precious resource right now is the time of myself and my cofounder. Every minute we spend tweaking and tuning an email server, is a minute we're not talking to customers, doing market research, working on our product, developing strategy, doing competitive intelligence research, etc. For us, that's not a tradeoff that makes sense.
Heh, maybe, in a sense. But realistically, I can't "work" 24x7, and taking a break to check/post HN is part of how I stay sane.
That and then there are periods throughout my day (especially at the $DAYJOB, like right now) when there isn't anything productive I can really do on the startup, and there aren't any pressing assignments, so reading HN is about as productive as anything else. :-)
Or to put it another way... we're a 2 person, self-funded, bootstrapped startup. Our most precious resource right now is the time of myself and my cofounder. Every minute we spend tweaking and tuning an email server, is a minute we're not talking to customers, doing market research, working on our product, developing strategy, doing competitive intelligence research, etc. For us, that's not a tradeoff that makes sense.