Managing black lists is definitely a pain in the ass. If you can do outgoing spamassassin it definitely helps. I also use MXToolbox's free plan to monitor my two outgoing mail servers for blacklist. Alternatively, you can use Nagios to monitor blacklists.
For an OSS self-hosted e-mail appliance, I've been using iRedMail. It's built on dovecot/postfix with a decent management interface for free. I run it on Ramnode for 2 bucks a month with no other costs. Works fine.
For some of the media encoding, presumably higher is better. x264 for sure: when talking about frames encoded per second, more would be better. the rest of the benchmarks are all "higher is better" so perhaps the same is true for seconds of (mp3|flac) encoded in a period. they are certainly ambiguous though.
