Panix Help System

Tweaking procmail to deliver to mbox format

By default, our mail system delivers mail to a special mail server. Mail there is not in your home directory space (although we provide access to it from a symbolic link, .maildir, in your home directory. Mail stored here is accessible via webmail and other IMAP clients and by POP clients, as well as with modern Unix mail clients such as Pine and Mutt. (We have created a version of Elm that can read these files, but it's not fully satisfactory and we recommend Mutt instead. If you really want to use it, please see our Elm help page.)

It is not only the location of the default INBOX that has changed from older mail systems; the format in which mail is stored has also changed. Where each folder used to be a single file, now each folder is a subdirectory tree within your .maildir space, and each message is a separate file.

This arrangement has a number of advantages for most users, but some people require (or prefer) to use the older format. If that's what you want to do, we suggest that you follow the format and location that was the default in our previous mail system.

To use an old-style mailbox in $HOME/.mailspool/$LOGNAME you have to change

the $DEFAULT variable in your .procmailrc file. That setting should be: DEFAULT=$HOME/.mailspool/$LOGNAME
the $MAIL environment variable. You set this in your .profile or .login (etc.) file as appropriate to your shell. That setting should be: $HOME/.mailspool/$LOGNAME; Use the syntax appropriate to your shell.

Note:
This entirely disables POP clients.
It also disables IMAP and webmail, but if you are happy with mbox format you have not been using these features in any case.