Reading the Unix Mail Spool in Mail.app

Question

Reading the Unix Mail Spool in Mail.app

It used to be the case that you could set up Mail.app to read the unix mail spool for your account. The unix mail spool is located at /var/mail/<username>. However, in Tiger the Mail.app only gives you the option for setting up a new account to use .Mac, POP, IMAP or Exchange.

Is there a simple way to get Mail.app to read the mail spool? I've seen a few kludges that involve aliases to mailboxes created in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ but they don't seem particularly satisfactory.

The only other solution seems to involve setting up an IMAP server which seems like overkill for something like this.

Is there a setting in the Mail plist file (or something as simple) that can turn on the ability to read the mail spool again?

I want to be able to do this as cron occasionally writes mail to the mail spool.

Cheers,

Stuart

Mac mini Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Dec 8, 2005 7:20 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 9, 2005 9:55 AM in response to Stuart Wheeler

Well, although my initial thoughts that an IMAP daemon was overkill, it turned out fairly easy to setup using Postfix Enabler. This handy little utility included an IMAP daemon as part of the package. The IMAP daemon reads the UNIX mail spool straight out of the box. With that running it was a cinch to create an IMAP account in Mail to sync with localhost.

All in all, it was fairly simple.

It would still be nice if Mail could just read the mail spool without having to set up an IMAP daemon.

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