Well, this gets back to the whole Internet concept.
The Internet originally held great promise, any IP could communicate with any other IP. You could set up a server to do some random thing and get global access to it.
But then along came dynamic IP's, and dialup, and it became ingrained that end users were dynamic and their ISP's would do their mail service. Except the mail service sucked, so then they'd Hotmail. And Hotmail sucked less.
But then along came cable and DSL, and despite technically being "dynamic", CPE would retain an IP for an indefinite amount of time, and in reality the users could have been assigned statically, except the ISP's wanted to discourage "servers" and cause people running servers to buy a more expensive class of service.
So now here we are, years later, with the NSA installing massive fiber taps on the small number of major mailbox providers around, because it became the "in" thing to use a major e-mail service.
And when you look at it, really, that's because, as a community, the technical people like me who've spent a career making the Internet work have mostly failed to actually make it _easy_ for the average person to set up and run a mail server.
And everyone who uses FreeNAS should have some vague idea of what I'm talking about... there's a ridiculous amount of configuration and flexibility for FreeNAS that is both a blessing and a curse. Would you give it to your mother to use, unconfigured?
So along comes Apple, for better or worse, and they do a pretty good job of packaging up existing technologies to make them accessible. But at the same time, they have an interest in making money. So they want to marry you to their Cloud product. They could just as easily have married you to a Mac that they sold you at home, and made it possible to have all your devices totally dependent on that computer instead of their Cloud, but largely they didn't... because that's more complicated, and Apple despises complicated.
So, I had to put forth all of that as context for what comes next:
Doing "really cool stuff" with an Apple device is difficult. But the flip side to that is that in wanting to do so, in an environment where it was never really designed to BE easy to do really cool stuff, this perpetuates the complexity problem and boy has the Internet turned into a train wreck of sorts as a result.
I would so very much love to be able to spend a little time to make a competent e-mail server plug-in for FreeNAS. Probably not today though. :-/
