[PLUG] How dangerous is handling my own mail?

[Eric House]

I just opened up port 25 on my firewall and configured exim so that
mail sent to me at my (zoneedit-DNS'd) host would reach me on that
box.  Cool!  Then I shut the port again because I have the general
impression that handling mail is a lot harder to do safely than
serving up web pages and the like.

Is that impression correct?  Assuming that exim's configured not to
accept or forward mail that's not to known users on my machine, how
much risk is there in opening that port?  Only ports 22 and 8080
(which the firewall passes to 80 internally) are open now.

I'm running Debian Testing.  I'm nothing close to a security expert,
but I do keep up with Debian security updates.

BTW, there's not much motivating this beyond "fun".  The
mailforwarding feature zoneedit provides is enough; I don't "need"
to handle mail myself.

Thanks,

--Eric
-- 
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* From the desktop of: Eric House, fixin at peak.org                            *
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