It's opensmtpd and my seven-line config took literally minutes to initially write back when I first did it years ago, with no prior experience.
It's required basically no maintenance at all from me. As for monitoring, I check my mail daily anyway and I will notice it if it stops flowing.
A few weeks ago I actually moved and took down my server. I took an old netbook and made it a new, temporary server. Again that took me literally minutes.
Thankfully smtp is a robust protocol so if something fails, you normally have a couple days to fix it before mail starts dropping.
But what do you do when you're using third-party email service and they decide to kick you out all of a sudden? Happened to me with Google. Happened to many other people as well, also with other providers.
I ran my own debian-exim for about a decade until I got tired of the care and feeding. opensmtpd does look suitably low-maintenance and I might pick it if I ever wanted to do this again, but it was released after I gave up being an email admin. I still have the mail domain, but having the same email address for sixteen years means ending up on a lot of spam lists.
You run your own server so you can easily set it up to accept any email matching some simple rules. This means you can give a different email address to every online service you use. If one of them starts getting spam, blackhole it.
I have been running my own email server this way for about 10 years and I have never needed any kind of antispam measure except a simple .procmailrc.
It's required basically no maintenance at all from me. As for monitoring, I check my mail daily anyway and I will notice it if it stops flowing.
A few weeks ago I actually moved and took down my server. I took an old netbook and made it a new, temporary server. Again that took me literally minutes.
Thankfully smtp is a robust protocol so if something fails, you normally have a couple days to fix it before mail starts dropping.
But what do you do when you're using third-party email service and they decide to kick you out all of a sudden? Happened to me with Google. Happened to many other people as well, also with other providers.