/var/mail and delivery

[Platonov]

Hi,

I'm having some problems with my e-mail setup. The last couple of months/years I have been using my own mailserver, which works out perfectly fine. I check my e-mail only on the server with (al)pine. There has never been a need to install fetchmail, pine moves the messages automatically to my local mailfolder on startup or when running.

   moved ... bytes of new mail to /home/user/mbox from /var/mail/user

Today I have installed Dovecot, in order to have POP3-access from other PC's. The access is no problem (I can retrieve messages with the other clients), but only when alpine is not running on the local server. Because alpine removes the messages from /var/mail/user, and puts them in /home/user/mbox, whereas the external clients just leave the messages on the server.

I would like to keep using the alpine program on the server too, besides the external clients. I think it could be solved with fetchmail on the local server, and instructing alpine not to retrieve any messages but to leave that up to fetchmail.

My question is... how? I see in htop that sendmail is running as well as postfix. Is it possible that postfix is removing the mail from /var/mail/user when alpine is running?

[Platonov]

There was an mbox file in my /home/user-folder, which caused alpine to move mail from /var/mail/user to /home/user. Deleting the mbox file solved the problem.