On Monday 13 January 2003 1:39 am, oeren@ykb.com wrote:
Hi,
This is an easy question, i think.
Easy question (to ask) yes; easy to answer? possibly... [but a detailed answer is not the thing to be doing at 2:00 am... ;) ] When i do some permission settings on
the console as user oguz, i receive a msg that says : "you've new mail in /var/spool/mail/oguz.
/var/spool/mail/<user> contains messages that are generated/received "locally" on your workstation [remember this point for later in the discussion] "oguz" is a single text file holding all messages
inside, as i see it. It's hard to read the msg's from here.
"/var/spool/mail/<username>" is a standard unix "inbox", and as you noted, "one large monolithic file of ASCII messages" ;) [now who was it said .pst's were evil? oh, wait, .pst's are "one large monolithic BINARY file of messages"] you generally do NOT use an editor to read this file [unless you're psychotic enough to use emacs...] but rather any one of a number of e-mail "clients". These clients look for the beginning and ending of messages and present them in a more orderly fashion than "one huge file"
I want to use kmail. But when i launch it; i see no msg's.
Remember I said earlier that /var... contains LOCAL messages? Most likely, kmail is probably configured to retrieve messages /from your ISP/, not from your local machine [unless you're using fetchmail, which as I said, is not the thing to be talking about at 2:00 am...] HOWEVER kmail can ALSO collect messages "from the local machine" go into the "settings" menu, "configure kmail" menu item select the "network" tab on the left side select the "receiving" tab on the right panel press the "add" button select "local mailbox" from the choices that are presented fill in the rest of the form items as appropriate [you may want to build a "top level" folder for this inbox to differentiate messages from your own machine, which will be things like the result of running CRON, and things from lists like this one] do a mail "scan" to retrieve the messages "from the spool" and "to your (new) inbox" -- note that this should "empty" the /var/spool/mail... file