Date: 2012mar11 OS: Linux Q. Linux: How can I quickly read mail on the command line? A. The regular thing is to use mailx or mutt but sometimes you want a quick-and-dirty way. Here it is:

grep ^From /var/mail/jsmith

Where jsmith is a userid. Will list all the mail to that user. Make sure you put "From" in that case. You can get more headers for each message like this:

grep -C 5 ^From /var/mail/jsmith

You need to me root to read other people's mail.