mail basics on a debian system

[Robert.Land@t-online.de (Robert Land)]

I'm not very experienced with unix/linux and would
appreciate some information on the mail topic.

I have this one box system, using my general account
'rland' and sometimes root for system configuration.

What I would like to know is if/how rland recieves mail
actually ment for root, because I rarely do a root shell
login. I couldn't find anything in the mail man page and
/etc/mail.rc has nothing looking like "root:rland", only
/etc/aliases created by eximconfig has these entries
which to my understanding forwards all mail to postmaster
and root to me which is 'rland'.

What I'm realy unsure about is if _all_ mail, even the one
sent by the lowlevel 'mail' program goes through port 25.
If yes, then exim should do all the work and all program/system
messages sent to root should reach me with the help of exims
/etc/aliases file. Is this correct and how can I generate
a system failure which would cause a root mail to test
this.



Any comments are grately appreciated.


Robert