I had that experience with Yahoo. I sent a single email to my brother whom has an account on Yahoo with SPF, DKIM, and not in any blackhole files. I received their 421 response "All messages from x.x.x.x will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed." and my only recourse was to fill in a "bulk email prioritization form" I was not sending bulk email and was thus denied for that program (nobody read my explanation that I am NOT a bulk mailer). It took over a month of contacting various channels to get them to take my mail.
I understand spam is a problem but email is perhaps the last communication identity you can own, and have interoperate with others. I have had my own domain and own email for 16 years now, and I am not going to give that up. Free email services come and go, but I own my identity.
I think the problem with DIY/small business email is that it is surprisingly difficult to set up a proper mail server. Sendmail book is about 4 inches thick, and my current setup is using 3 projects to achieve a simple mail server with SSL auth/IMAP. (Dovecot, postfix, SASL). I am a software dev, but even very good sysadmins I know do not want to have anything to do with email anymore and will often farm it out to Google.
I really think this used to be a problem. Why anyone in their right mind would even consider using Sendmail these days, is beyond me. I use exim - because I've used at work, and it's default in Debian -- but I'd generally recommend either postfix, or probably openbsd's opensmtpd (it's in Debian unstable). It's not really that hard, AFAIK no sane distros will set up an open relay out of the box anymore, and that's really all there is to it. Assuming you're serving less than a thousand users or so (eg: one user ;-).
Might want to set up greylisting, though, to curb incoming spam.
I understand spam is a problem but email is perhaps the last communication identity you can own, and have interoperate with others. I have had my own domain and own email for 16 years now, and I am not going to give that up. Free email services come and go, but I own my identity.
I think the problem with DIY/small business email is that it is surprisingly difficult to set up a proper mail server. Sendmail book is about 4 inches thick, and my current setup is using 3 projects to achieve a simple mail server with SSL auth/IMAP. (Dovecot, postfix, SASL). I am a software dev, but even very good sysadmins I know do not want to have anything to do with email anymore and will often farm it out to Google.