I ran my own email server at home for many years, but in the end I switched to Gmail/Google Apps about two years ago since
- I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole server.
- I could never get the spam filtering up to snuff. I had daily auto-training spam+ham folders etc set up, the works, but I'd always get a a few spam messages in my inbox, and a handful of false positives. Used SPF but it had to be softfail since someone I visit friends/relatives who's ISPs have blocked SMTP ports aside from their own relay.
- My fault, but I ran a forwarding address for a friend, and I got blocked by my ISP since it forwarded some spam messages that got flagged.
- I don't feel properly equipped to deal with backups. (sure you can set up an rsync to somewhere else [that you have to pay for], but you also want to keep monitoring that they're good, test restores, etc)
Easily worth $50/year for me to not have to think about it.
edit: forgot the biggest reason I switched: I got an iPhone, and iOS doesn't do push email over IMAP. Gmail supports Exchange, and there's no way I'm going to be hosting that myself...
I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole server.
What distribution are you using? I've never had this happen, though for important servers I tend to use Debian stable. I would be shocked if it happened on stable.
Ran into the same issues years ago (though this was only for myself and a couple family members). Didn't think I'd get myself blacklisted so easily. You really need to be up to par on spam filtering etc. Gapps is quite elegant for my needs most of the time.
- I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole server.
- I could never get the spam filtering up to snuff. I had daily auto-training spam+ham folders etc set up, the works, but I'd always get a a few spam messages in my inbox, and a handful of false positives. Used SPF but it had to be softfail since someone I visit friends/relatives who's ISPs have blocked SMTP ports aside from their own relay.
- My fault, but I ran a forwarding address for a friend, and I got blocked by my ISP since it forwarded some spam messages that got flagged.
- I don't feel properly equipped to deal with backups. (sure you can set up an rsync to somewhere else [that you have to pay for], but you also want to keep monitoring that they're good, test restores, etc)
Easily worth $50/year for me to not have to think about it.
edit: forgot the biggest reason I switched: I got an iPhone, and iOS doesn't do push email over IMAP. Gmail supports Exchange, and there's no way I'm going to be hosting that myself...