domain (especially email) hosting from home

[Greg Rundlett]

I know this has been discussed a lot over time, but I'm still not
familiar with setting up email from home to know what the best plan of
action is.

What I want to do is move my (low traffic) domains like rundlett.com
off an ISP and just serve it from home where it would be much easier
for me to maintain the websites without the added cost of monthly
hosting fees.  I know roughly what I need to do for security (although
pointers welcome), DNS (dyndns.org), apache, php, and mysql.  The
basic cluelessness comes into play when I think about hosting my mail
services.

I receive my email through rundlett.com, and a healthy dose of spam
through freephile.com; both of which are externally hosted through a
web hosting provider that includes email service and easy-to-manage
web-based administration of user accounts/aliases/forwards and even
lists.  How would I go about moving those services to my local machine
(offering email accounts to family too) with the least amount of
hassle and worry?

Is the short answer 'learn sendmail'?  I hope not.  I know that there
are a variety of SMTP servers, and I'm not sure which is favored for
simplicity.

I did find an article at "HowStuffWorks" for the mail-server clueless
like me http://computer.howstuffworks.com/email.htm, and also a
reference to the fact that if you have a Gmail account, that you can
use their smtp server while travelling/visiting other networks so that
sending email is not a  problem.
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/email-apps/how-to-use-gmail-as-your-smtp-server-111166.php

Thanks,

Greg