E-mail comes in. E-mail goes out. Simple, right? Ah, not so my friend. Your e-mail requirements and my e-mail requirements will probably be different. With this in mind, I'm going to take the easy way out and describe my e-mail setup and let you work out how to adapt the e-mail console to work to your needs.
I use Exim as my mail delivery agent (MDA). This delivers incoming mail to my personal mail folder/file. On a side note, a mail transport agent (MTA) delivers mail between connected mail hosts . On yet another side note, a mail user agent (MUA) is the e-mail client program you use to read and send e-mail. Fun stuff! A lot of Linux distributions use Sendmail as their MDA. Whatever works for you should be fine. The key thing to remember is that when using an MDA, local e-mail is delivered to your e-mail file, which is usually /var/mail/your_account. Some Linux distributions might differ on this configuration. I'm going to assume you don't receive e-mail directly from the Internet but instead use an ISP to store e-mail for you. If you are set up with a DNS, a static IP, and have direct Internet e-mail capabilities, stop reading this chapter, because you probably know more about e-mail systems than I do.
When e-mail is waiting at your ISP, you have basically two ways to get it. The first is to use a client e-mail program like KMail or Netscape Mail and retrieve your e-mail via POP or IMAP. The second is to use a program called Fetchmail that will also use POP or IMAP but will deliver your e-mail to your MDA, which will deliver the e-mail to your local account's mailbox ( /var/mail/your_account ). There are other ways to get your e-mail, but they are not relevant to this discussion.
Once the e-mail is in /var/local/your_account, you can use almost any e-mail client to retrieve it. This usually means transferring the e-mail into another folder in your home folder, .mail or Mail, or some other location.