Postfix and Dovecot are classic magic word projects - completely useless unless you can work out the magic words, and then they work fine.
The docs for magic word projects never to seem to prioritise essentials. So [obscure feature someone last used in 1984] gets equal billing with [essential fundamentals] and you have no idea which is which because - you haven't understood the docs yet.
I'm still running my own servers. I sorted out the spam issues, and they're basically zero maintenance now. But it certainly took a while, and a fair amount of copying other people's ideas of what a config file should look like, with plenty of trial and error.
Agree regarding learning the magic words. There''s probably no substitute to just diving in and setting up a server with a domain you can afford to get blacklisted for a few weeks while you make mistakes. But once you know the magic words, Dovecot's documentation is actually fairly decent these days: https://doc.dovecot.org/.
The docs for magic word projects never to seem to prioritise essentials. So [obscure feature someone last used in 1984] gets equal billing with [essential fundamentals] and you have no idea which is which because - you haven't understood the docs yet.
I'm still running my own servers. I sorted out the spam issues, and they're basically zero maintenance now. But it certainly took a while, and a fair amount of copying other people's ideas of what a config file should look like, with plenty of trial and error.