[Nottingham] Mail?

[David Aldred]

The man page for Cron says:

"When executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or 
to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab, if such 
exists)."

How does 'mail' in Linux work?  I expected that if I ran cron jobs with 
output, and then typed 'mail' in a console, I'd get a list of any cron output 
- but I get the message 'No mail for david'. 

If I type 'mail ben' (ben being another user set up on my system), and enter a 
subject and message, then log on as ben and type 'mail', I get the same 
message (s/david/ben): so it looks as thought this feature simply isn't 
working.

For cron specifically, it seems I could enter a full email address in the 
crontab, and expect it to send mail to my internet email box - I haven't 
tried this yet - but it seems silly to send stuff back and forth over the net 
when it's all local, if there's a Linux built-in way round it!

How do I make it work?

-- 
David Aldred