Systems privileged to act as mail servers, running on an IP that's not blacklisted, on a network that allows outbound unencrypted SMTP to random MXes, and maintained well enough to actually maintain reasonable deliverability metrics, are the vanishingly small special case compared to end-user client systems. Maintaining such a system requires non-trivial expertise. Congratulations, it sounds like you have it. Don't assume every random end-user does; it's far easier to tell your MUA "my mail server is over there".
Every single person I know who maintains a mail server on their personal system has had at least one incident where they either lost mail or had it delayed for days stuck in a mail queue somewhere. Life's too short. If you want to run your own mail server, please go right ahead; nobody is stopping you. However, many Linux distributions are trying to optimize for user-friendliness these days, not just flexibility and applicability to every possible use case. (See also http://islinuxaboutchoice.com/ .)
Posted Aug 12, 2013 11:33 UTC (Mon) by cas (subscriber, #52554)
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> it's far easier to tell your MUA "my mail server is over there".
it's nowhere near as difficult as you are pretending it is.
it's far easier to tell your MTA *once only* "my smarthost is there", than to have to configure the same information in every program that needs it - and then to re-configure them all when you change ISP or mail provider. or when you realise you need to handle work mail differently to personal mail.
> However, many Linux distributions are trying to optimize for
> user-friendliness these days,
the mistake you and your ilk are maing is assuming that "user-friendly" equals "crippled and dumbed-down". it's the same mistake microsoft made in the 80s...that apple managed to avoid until the late 90s.
if you want a system like that, there are several available - you don't need to turn linux into a clone of mac or windows. OS X is actually a pretty good system.
really, if you hate unix or linux that much, why do you even try to use it? use something else that suits your needs better instead of trying to ruin the things about linux that make it good.