Warning this is a geeky posting.

Ubuntu and other Linux systems automatically generate system messages for you about system status and maintanence chores. These messages often go overlooked because they are not easily read. These are the messages that are refered to when you open a terminal window and you see the message “You have new mail”.

I noticed a post over on the Ubuntu Blog explaining how to set up Evolution to receive these emails. Here is a way to set up Thunderbird (my current favorite email reader) so these system emails automatically come to my inbox.

1. Set up a new account by going to the Edit drop down menu and selecting Account Settings
2. Add Account and select Unix Mailspool (Movemail)
3. You can set the account name to something memorable and change the email address if you want. These setting will not change how this works.
4. That is all there is to it!! Easy as pie.

This account will now appear in Thunderbird and it will collect any mail in the your /var/mail or /var/spool/mail directory. You will have to change mode on the /var/mail directory to 01777. Open a terminal window and issue the command “sudo chmod 01777 /var/mail“. I’ve tested this on Thunderbird 1.5.0.2. If you have a different version of Thunderbird or a different Linux distro other than Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS, then your mileage will vary.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 6:36 am and is filed under Linux, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.