Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security, high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups, spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things. Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots...
None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started, but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally managed service.