6.10. Wrapping Up

If there is one thing that you take away from this chapter, let it be an appreciation for the complexity of building a mail infrastructure. There are a myriad of software choices at every level: from message transfer agents to message delivery agents, from mail access software to mail user agents. Each of these pieces of software in turn generally relies on other software to provide key functionality. This makes providing truly secure mail access a very difficult goal to achieve, but as long as you take things step by step while maintaining an understanding of the risks involved and how your architecture is designed to mitigate those risks, you will be in a much better position.