I currently read (nearly) all my mail on a remote system (this one) where I have a Linux shell login. I log in to the system using ssh and read my mail using mutt, this gives me access to my mail from anywhere with little hassle.
Since we now have broadband at home I can transfer this process (remote ssh login and use mutt) to my home Linux machine. This gives me a couple of extra advantages - virtually unlimited storage space and the ability to use a GUI/HTML mail reader when I'm at home if I want to.
The question is should I simply move all my fetchmail bits and pieces from the system where I currently read my mail to my home system or should I receive the mail using SMTP?
I already run a Postfix SMTP server on the home system for people to send mail to the outside world, I see no need to authenticate local users, if they can get into my house I may as well allow them to send mail!
Would it actually be easier/safer to collect all the mail using fetchmail (much of it is collected on the hosting service by using fetchmail to get it from other places) or does SMTP actually confer any advantages? It would actually be pretty easy just to transfer my .fetchmailrc file from where it is now to my home Linux box and not bother with SMTP at all.
If I open up the SMTP port to the outside world what issues are there? I want to deliver mail from my hosting service which handles all mail for my isbd.co.uk and isbd.net domains, I have a web configurator which will let me forward all this mail to my home machine (which is a subdomain of isbd.net). I can thus limit connections to just the hosting service so that will probably deal with most of the security issues, I will also obviously check that relaying is not allowed (I'm pretty sure it isn't now). I will still need to run fetchmail to get mail from a few old POP3 hosts where I get the odd message still.