New to Thunderbird; confused about local mail...

[stack]

Hey guys!

So I just started using Thunderbird due to a friend hounding me to try it...it is better then most of the kicks to the nether-regions other mail clients give me but still not 100% convinced yet (I like my combination of Gmail, pine, and mailx thank you very much!). Anyhoo...

The one (two parts?) complaint that I have with Thunderbird that I have been unable to find via Google is, how do I read local mail without a mail server running? How do I read "local mail" on a server on the LAN?

I *could* setup a mail server on each (heck most of these boxes are Debian and have exim on them by default) but I REALLY don't want to have to manage that many mail servers to just to pick up crontab entries and whatnot. I *could* set up a single mail server and have all the other systems hand off mail to it, but then I am still dealing with a mail server. It seems pretty straight forward to me to have Thunderbird just read the mail spool (says the guy who has not looked into this at all and probably has ZERO idea about the complexity behind it all), so why the need for a mail server? If I was trying to read it across the internet or even across LAN segments I can understand the need for a mail server, but for local mail or even local lan mail? Really?

I did some Googling and found a BUNCH of people complaining about this going all the way back to 2003 but besides a wishlist item I saw no solution. I am perfectly content to just continue on my routine of ssh'ing into a server and running mail, but I figure if I am going to use a mail client then why not have it gather all that mail for me?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
~Stack

[David Miller]

It sounds like you want the MUA to do the job of the MTA/MDA, which is kind of weird. I think the best option is your single mail server idea.

But, the thunderbird faq http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq seems to say that you can just drop mbox files into the "Mail" folder and have it pick them up. Maybe you could create some kind of network file mount to the mbox spool files and have links to them in your thunderbird Mail folder.

http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq

[stack]

So far no luck. It didn't like that at all. For the time being I am continuing to log into the other system manually like I normally do but if I figure it out I will post back.