I'm trying to read local mail with Thunderbird on Ubuntu (with both 12.04 and 13.04). I've followed the instructions found here: How can I access system mail in /var/mail/ via thunderbird?

I can read mail on the system using alpine or vim, so I know the mailbox is not empty. When I click the get-mail button, nothing happens. I see no Inbox (or any folder structure) for the specific account. I've set the rights for /var/mail to 1777.

Settings

• server name: localhost
• username: john

How can I get this working?

Okay, considering the extra bounty, I would like to get this working like normal mail. The accepted answer from Qasim resulted in a much more usable situation than before - opening mail in Thunderbird with layout. I still face three problems though.

1. When new mail is received in the mailbox, Thunderbird won't see this until after I restart Thunderbird.
2. When Thunderbird is restarted, all mail is reset to unread and deleted mail is undone. This is probably because Thunderbird reads the mail from the /var/mail/www-data file, but doesn't update this file. So after restarting, it simply reads this file again, with the new mail and all old mail.
3. This is probably a postfix issue: mail is sent out to existing mail addresses, but cannot be delivered because the receiving mailserver cannot be reached. This results in "Undelivered mail returned to sender". Only one mailserver can be reached: localhost. Because this is a test system, I don't want real customers to receive mail. I've blocked mail ports in UFW to be sure.

When opening the returned mail, I can scroll down and then I see the original mail with proper layout. So I can read the mail, see if the proper images are included, and for me that's workable. Having to restart TB to read new mail - I know when new mail arrives, so I know when to restart. Having old mail restored after a restart - not big problem as well. I can delete the mail file if it gets too much. I know how it works, but it would be nice if it worked like normal.