I mean… you can, but beyond the technical aspect of setting up the hardware/services/DNS, you also have to deal with the unknowable black boxes that are the major email services. As a very small server, you’re gonna run into deliverability issues and have absolutely no feedback or recourse from the giants. There’s a decent chance that you’ll end up with a perfectly configured mail server that, through no fault of your own, fails to actually get your messages to their recipients.
(Sorry to be a bummer here! If you do go this route, I hope that everything works out well for you.)
I’ve always found game threads useful as a scoreboard and as a way to see which games were interesting and worth catching up on based on the number of comments. I hope this community can reach that level of engagement.
For now, it probably doesn’t make sense to have both game threads and post-game threads. Would it make sense to edit the game thread with the final score and stats once a game ends?