Sure. I've been running my own mail server for almost 20 years, but you seemed to imply that the bare act of sending email from a personal server to Gmail was a bad idea for some reason.
I've been running my own email server since... forever. In 1985 it was uucp ! paths and sendmail. I got a "for real" domain just for email in 1993, still over uucp dialup. DSL always on in 1999. But it does become harder as time goes on.
