OS X: sending mail to localhost

Question

For testing purposes I want send mail to my localhost user account rather than my webserver. I am unsure how to do this using mail.app. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm looking to login into my (local) mail server, access a mailbox, and do some parsing. So, I assume there's a mail server running locally but not sure how to access it

The local mail isn't stored in a POP3/IMAP server, but rather using a UNIX'y mbox. A file stored in /var/mail/ (the file-name is the users login)

For example..

$ mail dbr
Subject: hi
test
^d # ctrl+d (EOF)
$ cat /var/mail/dbr 
From dbr@parabola.local  Tue Dec 30 13:43:57 2008
Return-Path: 
X-Original-To: dbr
Delivered-To: dbr@parabola.local
Received: by parabola.local (Postfix, from userid 501)
        id 4FEA1158E36; Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:43:57 +1030 (CST)
To: dbr@parabola.local
Subject: hi
Message-Id: <20081230031357.4FEA1158E36@parabola.local>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:43:57 +1030 (CST)
From: dbr@parabola.local (dbr)

test

Not sure about Ruby (I had a search around, but couldn't find anything, although there is undoubtably a module for this), but I know Python has a maildir.mbox module, which would use in the following way:

>>> msgs = mailbox.mbox("/var/mail/dbr")
>>> for msg in msgs:
...     print "Subject:", msg['subject']
... 
Subject: hi