Setting up a mail server is not inherently difficult. But as with anything, you can take a simple problem and overcomplicate it. You can take an old, hard-to-

Setting up a mail server is not inherently difficult. But as with anything, you can take a simple problem and overcomplicate it. You can take an old, hard-to-configure daemon and twist every knob of it, then add a bunch of poorly written & hard-to-configure extras for spam filtering, imap, web mail access (at this point you're also configuring a web server and whatever language & frameworks & databases & deps are used by that web mail thing), and so on. Or you can do a simple setup with fewer than ten lines of configuration for the mail daemon (written in a matter of minutes) with no extra goop, on a system where the tools are integrated so you don't need to figure out how to install anything.