Django and email send/receive best practices?

Wondering what HN'ers might be doing to deal with sending and receiving email from Django.

We are working on a project to be deployed on Linode. The ideas now range from actually installing and managing a mail server (why does it have to be so painful?) to using Mandrill for outgoing and something like ClouldMailin for incoming.

To be clear, I am not talking about handling all email for an organization but rather incoming and outgoing emails relevant to the web app.