Easier way to get an email server running?

Question

This is probably going to sound noobish and ranty, and I apologize in advance for that, but I really am looking for an answer. Google has not been very helpful so far.
I currently have a VPS which I use for misc stuff, including hosting some websites. I would like to get email working, so that I can send/receive email on my website domains (via gmail or clients, not webmail).
I have read through several forum posts and various articles regarding email servers using postfix, dovecot, mysql, etc. Most tutorials on getting an email server setup contain walls of configuration settings that you need to make. They use separate programs for sending email, receiving email, full-blown databases for user accounts... It feels severely over-engineered, and I feel like my head is going to explode while trying to understand what the heck is going on.
Is there really no easier way to do this? People in forums talk about postfix being the best and easiest there is, but a wall of configuration text that doesn't make sense doesn't seem easy to me. Yeah I could probably copy/paste that text into my configuration files, and yeah it'd probably work, but I wouldn't understand how or why it worked, and I wouldn't be able to make future changes.
I would think that there would be a single package out there, a single program, that you could handle everything email (at least as far as sending/receiving email via IMAP). Kind of like how you have a web server like Apache or Nginx, where it's a single program that works out of the box, and can be configured further afterwards. Why does email have to be so difficult? I can only assume that things are setup this way in order to cover every possible configuration of email services that anyone could possibly want on any scale. But I just want a simple email server, on a single server, with just a few common options. Are there any alternatives, or is postfix+dovecot+mysql+spamd+opendkim really the only real option on linux right now?
(And before anyone says to develop something myself... yeah, it's tempting... but why spend time reinventing the wheel if it's already out there, right?)

Answer 1

A "web server" is rarely just Apache (or nginx, lighttpd etc) on it's own. There's often additional tools such as PHP, MySQL etc as well.
A "mail server" is the same; an encompassing term for a collection of tools that each handle different aspects. Postfix and Dovecot is all you need for what you've described; Postfix handles mail delivery (inbound mail to your users, and outbound mail from your users) while Dovecot handles presenting the received mail to your users. IMHO, it follows the Unix philosophy very well; one tool, one job. (All working together).
Postfix might seem daunting, but it is actually very well documented, inside the configuration file itself (main.cf) and on the website. This page may be a good place to start: http://www.postfix.org/STANDARD_CONFIGU … EADME.html
I'd suggest get Postfix working delivering inbound and outbound mail, then you can add Dovecot (or IMAP daemon of your choice) once that's up and running.