How to read email received on a Debian server

Just type mail, it is the most basic way to read the mail. It should be installed by default on a Debian system, it comes from the mailutils package. Read the man page or type ? to figure out commands to use.

But there are better ways to read the mail. As noted earlier, mailx is an improved version. Even more user-friendly are mutt, cone and (al)pine. All of these are packaged by Debian and can be installed by apt-get

I find the mail program difficult to use. The mail is stored in a flat file, so I use vi /var/spool/mail/user and manage it there.

/var/mail/user

or

/var/spool/mail/user