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I look exactly the same : enter image description here But What makes me suprised is that they are synchronous. enter image description here

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    This might help!
    – user96753
    Jan 20, 2012 at 6:27

2 Answers 2

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/var/spool/mail is a symbolic link to /var/mail on my Debian/Sid system:

 % ls -ld /var/mail /var/spool/mail
 drwxrwsr-x 2 root mail 4096 Dec 31 17:46 /var/mail
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    7 May 12  2011 /var/spool/mail -> ../mail
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    thx, /var/mail is a symbolic link to /var/spool/mail in RHEL 5
    – 爱国者
    Jan 21, 2012 at 0:57
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    Gentoo also links /var/mail to /var/spool/mail. Feb 3, 2015 at 17:10
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What you ask is really a matter of preferences; meaning: whatever mail delivery daemon you have in use on your system can use either or.

More specifically, it's a mere matter of preference of options laid out by the FHS.

Typically, on more complex mail configurations, things like mail queue, deferred messages, etc are stored in a structure in /var/spool/, independent of /var/mail.

You can see /var/mail used separately from /var/spool/mail (AKA: not symlinked). Local mail will end up in /var/mail - while SMTP daemon handling email for virtual mailboxes, etc will happen in /var/spool/mail

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