Hell we've pretty much 'uncreated' email over the past decade. How many people do you know who don't get their email via Google or Microsoft? I used to work for a very large university. Back when I was there, there was a team of Unix greybeards hosting all of the Universities email off of a bunch of Solaris boxes. It worked pretty flawlessly, end when it didn't they knew how to fix it. Today it's all been handed over to Microsoft and when something doesn't work, the help desk can just shrug and say "nothing we can do, it's Microsoft"

Running your own email server in any practical meaning is more or less impossible.