Re: what is /var/mail/sandip?

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "Sandip" == Sandip P Deshmukh <Sandip> writes:

    Sandip> most of biff, xbiff, etc programs point to
    Sandip> /var/mail/sandip directory. what is this? am i missing on
    Sandip> some powerful feature of linux way of handling mail?  is
    Sandip> there a more elegant way of handling e-mail than what i
    Sandip> used to do in windows?

A Unix system is default is set up to be a MTA (mail transfer
agent). This means you get full email services even if you are not
networked, and full mail transfer if you do get networked and get it
all right. The MTA facility is independent of the Mail User Agent
(MUA) which people use to read mail, like mail, mutt, mozilla
etc. When using an MUA you get to choose where the MUA gets mail
from. On UNIX systems this is usually from $MAIL (var/mail/$USER on
Debian) because that is where the MTA places new mail.

Windows systems provide an MUA (Netscape, Outlook etc.), but not
MTA. The MTA is usually at your ISP. Usually you use POP or IMAP to
have your MUA get mail from the MTA, and MUA programs typically use
SMTP to send mail to to the ISP for forward delivery (unless you use
MS Exchange, where it all changes to something MS specific).

On Linux, you can set up your own MTA. Debian comes with exim as the
default (I believe). It is relatively easy to set up (run eximconfig
as root, probably you want the smarthost setting) and works well. 

Even if you set up your MTA you probably will not be able to convince
your ISP to forward your mail to you. A program called fetchmail does
this very well by polling your ISP, fetching your mail and delivering
it via your installed MTA so it looks like your mail was really sent
to your Linux box directly. You can run it by hand as a normal user,
or run it as a daemon. I'd suggest you run it by hand starting out,
and switching to a daemon as you figure all this out.

For your MUA use whatever you like. Get your mail from /var/mail/$USER
if you are using fetchmail.

Personally, I run exim, fetchmail and I used Gnus/XEmacs to read mail
and news. I also use procmail to break my incoming mail (~500
messages/day) into different files so I can read related messages in
different folders.

You are obviously overwhelmed with your move to Linux in some sense,
and need to RTFM a fair bit ;-)

Cheers!
Shyamal