The article presents a fair argument, but the title is obviously flame bait.
Granted, I myself thought of setting up my own mail server, but the disadvantages quickly outweighed the benefits. If your argument is sheer privacy, unless you are hosting your mail on a physical machine at your house connected to your home ISP (which is pretty dumb if you want ~100% uptime), you will most likely either use a VPS or managed system under the control of yet another company, which privacy-wise is the equivalent of using Gmail anyway.
I'm sure setting up your own hobby mail server would be pretty fun and provide great deals of experience, but if you are doing so simply for data privacy or better up time, your point is moot, and you will probably be better off just using a provider like Google.
Granted, I myself thought of setting up my own mail server, but the disadvantages quickly outweighed the benefits. If your argument is sheer privacy, unless you are hosting your mail on a physical machine at your house connected to your home ISP (which is pretty dumb if you want ~100% uptime), you will most likely either use a VPS or managed system under the control of yet another company, which privacy-wise is the equivalent of using Gmail anyway.
I'm sure setting up your own hobby mail server would be pretty fun and provide great deals of experience, but if you are doing so simply for data privacy or better up time, your point is moot, and you will probably be better off just using a provider like Google.