I would not recommend unifi for a mature solution. It sure works nice as a glass panel, but it will get limiting if you will have a desire to hack around your network. Their APs are solid, though, it's just the USG/Dream machine that I wouldn’t recommend.
Mikrotik software is very capable and hackable and you can run it in a vm if you feel like bringing your own hardware.
I need to call BS on this. No one cares. I’ve been running a small go-smtp based server that would do some processing on forwarded mail for 2 years now and I don’t see much of “attacks”. Yeah, sometimes I get passersbys trying to figure if this is a mail relay, which it’s not.
You absolutely don’t need a dedicated machine and an IDS. And you definitely need crowdsec.
Yeah, sending mail is somewhat hard lately, but DKIM and DMARC can be figured out. Receiving mail is just straightforward.