Local Delivery

qmail will not write mail into /var/mail. This is in line with Dan Bernstein's efforts to make qmail secure.

As a result, you typically deliver mail into $HOME/Mailbox, and have to teach each and every MUA where the mail is.

Most mail programs recognise $MAIL or $MAILDROP, fortunately. (Maybe the others could be put out to pasture?)

The only trap I had with local delivery was that I was using qpopper for POP3 clients and while this uses $MAIL it still uses /var/mail for temporary files. I gave in to my perfectionist streak and patched qpopper.

An alternate solution is to deliver mail into "Maildirs" and use the pop daemon that comes with qmail, but this is a far more invasive change. Only "mutt" seems to support Maildir format out of the box.

giles@nemeton.com.au