Email Sync – Best Ways to Sync Email Across Computers

I am constantly using different computers between home/work and I'd like to be able to easily check all of my email in one place, and I'd prefer not to use a web based mail program.

Currently I use Mac Mail on my laptop which downloads all of my email (from about 6 accounts) and filters it into different folders. However, this means I can only really 'check' my email from my Mac but I'd like to be able to use a program with the same settings to check my mail from other computers (windows or linux) in the same way (having everything downloaded from multiple mail servers and sorted into directories.)

I recently set up a home ubuntu server as an OpenVPN and Samba server so I could just mount a shared drive on any computer I use regardless of location/OS. My initial thoughts to solving syncing email was to switch to thunderbird and then just keep all of my mail files in the samba shared directory. Then the idea would be to either just point the user configuration files of thunderbird on any computer I'm using to the Samba mount or use a program like Unison to sync the user directories for Thunderbird. Has anyone tried something like this?

The other idea I toyed with was using Postfix + some IMAP server on my Ubuntu server, but I've never done something like that and I'm not sure exactly how they work. Would I be able to use Postfix to download and sort my email into different folders from multiple accounts and then just point any mail program to it's IMAP server and check my email that way? Doing some googling I found a lot of people recommend against hosting your own mail server though?

Thanks in advance for all of your thoughts and opinions on how I should go about this!