Thing is, you grew up in the pioneering age of computing, and in that time you needed to do everything yourself. This gave you a bunch of skills for free, that are hard to do today, because most of the hard stuff is automated away and snuck behind a gui and/or containers.
I run unattended-upgrades on all the debian/ubuntu deployments I manage. One of the deployments even has automatic reboots enabled. I still do major upgrades by hand/terraform, but the process itself works flawless in my experience.
Syslog is what you are looking for.
SCO OpenServer
See a search engine and do some research. Maybe try out a bunch of different distros and find out for yourself
We have a bunch of these at the hackerspace. They run vanilla debian and connect to a terminal server using xdmcp. Works like a charm.
Some script that parses blocklists into unbound local-data statements, combined with cron and unbound-control
Been hosting my own email for over 20yrs. Get a vps at some reputable hoster, and make this a dedicated mailserver. Be sure to setup all dns records that are required, and rollout antispam measures.