The problem I have is that it's a pain in the ass to setup correctly and when things do go wrong it's really hard to figure out what's going on.

> Can you explain what you mean by attacks and exploits from spammers?

I haven't encountered a remote exploit (yet) but yes: accidentally running an open relay, backscattering, etc. You also have to worry about the system security of the box you're running it all on but let's treat that as a separate concern.

I'd been running my setup for years and as recently as August of last year I was dealing with an outage of my email server. I must've missed something somewhere because someone had figured it out and started using my server as a relay. It took me a few days to figure it out and I'm still not sure what the problem was or how I fixed it. Though my server stopped bouncing emails and started forwarding things again so... win?

As I was fixing this issue, not the first time, it occurred to me that it was just criminally easy to not know if your system is being exploited as a relay or not. There are a bunch of different configuration files in all different formats and guides that require working through dozens of steps. It's way too easy to get something wrong.

For someone like me who works at deploying software running on hundreds of nodes it seems manageable but I don't think it's ready for my cousin who's good with computers.

That's where the idea for a secure-by-default MTA that couldn't possibly be configured to be an open relay came from. Minimize the configuration so it was hard to get wrong even at the expense of flexibility.

I dunno, maybe it's not a great idea. But it's fun to hack on in the evenings when I've got nothing better to do and hopefully I'll have a fewer text files to manage in the future.