

The battery turning into a Spicy pillow is always a Concern for using laptop as an always powered on server. So even though you will be away from it, make sure that there is a way for someone to keep an eye on it, once every week or two.
That said, I have been using a dell laptop as a desk workstation (and remote use) with an uptime of 2.5 years at this point.
Seconding fetchmail. It’s configuration is quite elaborate for a whole bunch of situations. I’ve used it in a small office situation to pull email from their legacy ISP’s POP into an internal IMAP server, so they could have multiple clients sharing mailboxes. (And so they couldn’t set weak passwords on an internet-connected system :-/ )