Nowadays, most people would think that email is something simple, you just setup your preferred client (that’s called a MUA) with some information such as the smtp host you want it to talk to (that’s call a MTA and this one is your relayhost). Then there’s all the receiving mails part, and that’s smtp again on the server side. Then there’s how to get those mail, read them, flag them, manage them, and that’s better served by IMAP.