Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

I really wouldn't have predicted the extreme amount of centralization, and arguably unnecessary centralization, that we have today for things like university email and web servers. Even 20 years ago when I was in college, the servers I interacted with including email, were all in our school's /16. They did have software packages for LMS and stuff, but those were mostly deployed on-prem.

Today the websites are hosted on third party cloud servers (my school's main website is some company that hosts your Wordpress or Drupal site so you don't have to) and the email by Microsoft or Google. Same for every school it seems. I guess the IT department that used to run all the infra is now probably just a few people in charge of ordering new laptops for faculty/staff when they break, and replacing Wi-Fi access points every 5 years.

Spam is another reason most places don't bother with selfhosting email now. Big providers like GMail aggressively filter unknown servers so if you attempt to host your own and don't setup everything perfectly (or even if you do and you trigger their filter ban threshold) all your email will silently fail to deliver or be blackholed to the Spam folder for the largest email providers and you might never find out or have a way to get them to reconsider.