Well I've been running my personal email server (Postfix on a FreeBSD VPS) for four or five years now, and spam just hasn't been an issue for me. Between the S

Well I've been running my personal email server (Postfix on a FreeBSD VPS) for four or five years now, and spam just hasn't been an issue for me. Between the Spamhaus ZEN DNSBL, greylisting, and SpamAssassin, I just don't get any appreciable amount of spam in my inbox. (Less than I used to get in my Gmail account.) And as far as I know, I've never missed a message I was supposed to receive. I don't have trouble with outbound mail getting rejected, either... you have to make sure you have a "clean" IP address (didn't end up on a blacklist because of some previous server at that address), you need a valid reverse DNS PTR record, and it's a good idea to have an SPF record and do DKIM signing as well. Now sure, this is more work and more expensive than just using Google Apps. But it does work if you do it right, and it's not "unnecessary administration" if you care at all about the privacy and security of your email, or if you need things like full procmail filtering capabilities that aren't available with Google Apps.