Sure there are benefits with having your own email system versus a hosted solution (ie. you have the data on your server(s)), but it comes with maintenance head

Sure there are benefits with having your own email system versus a hosted solution (ie. you have the data on your server(s)), but it comes with maintenance headaches too. We recently switched over to Atmail (http://atmail.com/ http://atmail.com/) after years of running Cyrus+Postfix (with various anti-spam tools). Atmail is kinda the best of two worlds -- you have control over your data, but the software is easy to maintain. Under the hood, Atmail is using standard Unix/Linux components (dovecot, exim, spamassasin etc), but makes it easy to maintain. For a few other companies I'm involved with, I've deployed Google Apps, just because it's dead simple and gives you no headache.