[mhurron]

It's not that hard. SPF/Domainkeys records are only needed if you don't run it on a residential ISP account. Use your ISP as a smart relay instead.

I have greylisting and MailScanner to cover spam. filtering. Personally I use spamd on my OpenBSD firewall for greylisting, but have used a Postfix greylisting setup in a corporate environment. MailScanner combines SpamAssassin and Anti-Virus scanning of your mail before delivery. I rarely get spam.

Making sure not to run an open relay isn't all that hard, it's even easier if you use a webmail interface outside your own network.

Learning how to run a small mail server isn't hard. Yes a little up front research is mostly all it takes. My mail server runs mainly hands off. A little up front cost in time saved a recurring monthly cost.