Configuration of postfix and mail for local mail only

[Syzygy]

So my Gentoo box is running nearly perfectly. I checked the log files and there were absolutely no errors whatsoever ... except for one. cron was failing to locate postfix so it could send its regular messages to root. So I emerged postfix and added it to rc. No problem. Since I don't want to run a mailserver, and just want postfix to manage local mail, I decided just to use the default conf file. With about a bajillion messages waiting to be sent in the queue it would be a good few hours before postfix processed them all.

They all ended up in /root/.maildir/new. Yet, when I run mail, it claims I have no messages. The MAIL environment variable is not defined. Should I define it? What should I define it to? Basically, how do I tell mail and/or postfix to place messages in or get messages from the correct maildir?

And, in a broader question, is it safe to simply use the default postfix conf file if I don't want any mailserver capabilities at all?

(By the way, installing postfix was the last step to having a completely clean, error-free log history. Yay!)
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Tim Morgan
DP G5/1.8GHz, no working Gentoo (yet...)

[adaptr]

First of all, you need to tell your system that you want to use maildirs instead of mboxes - if you set the maildir USE flag and rebuild, say, mailbase or postfix, the variable should be set for you (I never had to specify it by hand).

The shell variables MAIL and MAILDIR should, indeed, be set - if unset, they default to $HOME, which is fine for an mbox, but not a maildir.
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>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen