[clue-tech] mbox

[Jason S. Friedman]

I'm running Ubuntu 7.1 with no non-standard packages.  I generally use
Thunderbird 2.0 as my mail client.

At a command prompt the mail command returns nothing.

jason at love ~ $ mail
No mail for jason

That's probably consistent with the contents of /var/spool/mail (symlink
to /var/mail)

jason at love ~ $ ll /var/mail
total 2304
-rw-rw---- 1 arthur       mail  101697 2008-01-25 12:39 arthur
-rw-rw---- 1 jason        mail       0 2008-01-25 18:08 jason
-rw-rw---- 1 julia        mail 2089110 2008-01-25 16:53 julia
-rw-rw---- 1 matchingmoms mail  150707 2008-01-25 15:57 matchingmoms
-rw-rw---- 1 powerpull    mail       0 2008-01-25 15:02 powerpull

Yet, my procmail log shows, for example:

 From amit at interbasecorp.com  Fri Jan 25 18:07:51 2008
  Subject: Informatica Administrator
   Folder: /home/jason/mail/Inbox
    12683

Anyway, using Thunderbird I _can_ see my new mail, even though my mail
file is empty and I've told Thunderbird to look there for mail:

jason at love ~/mail $ ll Inbox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jason jason 21 2008-01-24 13:40 Inbox -> /var/spool/mail/jason

Now, there is an mbox file in my home directory, and it's growing, and
it contains the messages that Thunderbird is showing me:

jason at love ~ $ ll mbox
-rw------- 1 jason jason 2520800 2008-01-25 18:08 mbox

So, why is my mail being directed to mbox, and why is Thunderbird able
to see it there?