I'm asking this because one time, while browsing the GNU website, I noticed that some of the members' emails had "gmail" on them!! And I asked myself how would that be possible?? And I think other members of the FSF had Gmail too. Why? Richard Stallman is against Gmail, so why would those memberse use it?? Would that mean I can use non-free software while advocating and loving free/libre software??
I mean, ever tried hosting your own email server in ${CURRENT_YEAR}? Might as well write those mails to a thumb drive and throw it out of the window.
I haven't. What happens?
Unless you jump through a crazy number of hoops, your domain just gets blacklisted by every spam filter under the sun.
At best all your sent mail goes to junk, at worst it is just blocked altogether.
Convincing the popular small services to not mark new mail services as junk is extremely difficult
I remember when it was considered a mark of professionalism for a web developer to have an email on their own domain. At some point that changed. I think after GMail came out it was so good that everybody switched to that.
Ah that's still totally possible, I do that.
The domain isn't all that important, the IP address of the mail server is. I pay an external service that provides a mail server, and my DNS records point to that.
But hosting my own mail server, while possible is not recommended.