[mbrock]

Great comment.

As for programmers fearing servers: all the mail servers I've tried are almost incredibly byzantine, making them stressful to configure and hard to understand.

My brother got tired of this and wrote a functioning and mostly conformant SMTP server in less than 50 lines of bash (using djb's tcpserver and delivering to maildrop).

As far as I'm concerned, all the configuration I can ever imagine needing for a simple SMTP server could be specified with like max 3 command line switches.

So yeah, I think it is a somewhat rational fear, and I don't understand why everything seems so amazingly complex.

[jlgaddis]

FWIW, OpenSMTPD is extremely simple to configure and get up and running. (I don't use it other than as an "outbound-only sender" but the configuration file is very readable and simple).

[c22]

To add to that I've found OpenBSD in general to be extremely easy to administer. Most configuration is straight forward and no more complex than necessary with very clear documentation.

[mbrock]

Cool, thanks.