[spin]

I know a lot of programmers who shiver at the thought of managing their own servers...

I used to be a sysadmin; now I'm a programmer. I love to host my own webservers and the like. But email? That's just a never-ending uphill battle. Between spam, and whitelists, and botnets constantly port-scanning your server (hope I've got all the latest patches, etc..).

For me, GMail solved this. GMail solved spam, and hassle. (At the cost of all my privacy being in the hands of a for-profit corporation.)