It is 2023 and we did the unthinkable: spun up our own mail server for sending transactional mail.
Some tips: warming up an IP address is critical (see https://sendgrid.com/resource/email-guide-ip-warm-up/) and expect to be greylisted at first, especially by mail providers at registrars and web hosts so ensure you have decent retries configured.
Watch your logs for messages telling you to back off (e.g. Google rate limited us on our second day so we reduced the volume of mail until we had a little more reputation).
@mudge You may need to forward this thread to the BBC. They've no idea how to run an email server, apparently.
@shane yikes, it is very easy to slip up.