I've also built a couple of very large mail clusters (full 42U rack sized, 20+ machines) for ISPs before running courier, sendmail and procmail and it's really not that much management or effort to get it off the ground. The real bugger is getting a management front end on it all (postfixadmin doesn't cut it on that scale so it's LDAP time which isn't much fun).
I've rather horribly dealt with Exchange (2000, 2003) and that's just a whole pile of pain. My noble Exchange battling colleagues inform me that it still stinks.