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Seems like too much work
Authored by: NrTal on Mar 18, '04 03:54:11PM

If you are receiving email in you Unix account, isn't there a mail server running locally whether Postfix or Sendmail? I was able to set mine in Mail up as a normal mailbox, using localhost as the server. If I log into Terminal with another user and send mail using unix's mail command to my short user name Mail finds it fine.

Mind you, I set this up as part of an ongoing project to do local web development. I used PostFix Enabler to get it running, but I don't think it did anything I wouldn't have done through Unix had I not been looking for a GUI. But from the first hint it sounds like there would be a server running on localhost already, so maybe someone could explain why just using it as such wouldn't work.



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Seems like too much work
Authored by: NrTal on Mar 18, '04 03:57:04PM

After I hit Submit I went to close Postfix Enabler and noticed the 'Setting up Mail.app' button that ends up going to their website, so that's how I found out how. Still, it seems to me that no matter how you've got it running locally Mail should be able to see it if it's a mail server.



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Seems like too much work
Authored by: jbc on Mar 19, '04 12:59:29PM

I'm curious if this actually works for you. My experience is that Panther Mail is broken with respect to checking local mail using a server. Installing a POP3 server and checking /var/mail mailboxes from Mail worked fine in Jaguar; Panther's Mail will *only* let me check the local mailboxes if my dial-up connection is active.

I have fetchmail and exim routing all my mail to the local mail spools in the background while my connection is up; most of the time, I'm *not* connected when I finally decide to read my mail. Mail no longer works for this, so ended up trashing Mail and switching to a client that will let me check the local mailboxes correctly.



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Seems like too much work
Authored by: ethomas on Mar 19, '04 06:49:07AM

The point here is that you can now (once again) use Mail.app to read your local unix system mailboxes (i.e. johndoe@localhost) without running a local mail server. If I remember correctly, Mail.app in OS X 10.0 could do this, but Apple pulled this functionality from subsequent versions.

Anyway, this is very handy if, for example, you use cron regularly:

From the cron man pages:

When executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab, if such exists).



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