Yea, it's been a vast wasteland for the past 50 years.

The purpose of the American military is to provide jobs to the lower classes and keep the money circulating. Automating target identification defeats the purpose, however it does push money up towards the geniuses that come up with this stuff.

I've been self-hosting my personal email for the last 3 years and have found it to be almost as pain free as a hosted account. The only issues I've run into is that on a couple of occasions the IP address block containing the IP address of my server would get blacklisted and I would have to go through the procedure of getting my IP address whitelisted. On one occasion an automatic software update failed to bring postfix back up, so I had to start it manually. That's it.

I might get one spam email every few months, despite not running any kind of spam filtering software (i.e. SpamAssassin). Other than the above issues I've never had to tinker with anything, it just works - and email is sent and received instantly because my server never has to queue my messages.

When setting up an email server most people who have problems fail to ensure that:

• The server's SMTP banner messages resolves to the server's primary IP address (do 'telnet 25', the part following the '220' is the SMTP banner message
• The PTR record of the primary IP address resolves to the SMTP banner message
• Strong passwords are used, thus allowing the account to get compromised by spambots

The downside of course is that you have to pay for hosting and a domain and you have to go through the hassle of initially setting it up. For postfix (SMTP) and dovecot (POP3/IMAP) you need to configure:

/etc/postfix/main.cf
/etc/postfix/virtual
/etc/dovecot.conf

G+ may be evil but Google is your friend when it comes to getting these files setup correctly ;)