Fair enough - I got it working recently but it was the hardest self-hosting install I've done. No way most people would succeed. Email is 50(?) years of questionable design decisions piled on top of each other so it's become a whole world of weird stuff. Doing email should be it's own tech specialty, like 'devops' or 'db admin' is. There's enough depth to it.

There are a ton of email providers who are not Google, though. e.g. https://proton.me/mail. You don't need to run it on your own hardware.