Displaying emails with mutt

Question

After being able to retrieve emails from an IMAP account on a remote mail server using fetchmail and POSTFIX as an MTA, I am able to see the emails in the spool folder /var/spool/mail/ghassan in a text file which is called "ghassan". Upon opening mutt I get a note that says

"/var/spool/mail/ghassan" is not a mailbox.

Any ideas what the reason behind that could be?

How should I proceed

Content of .muttrc looks like this:

set realname=ghassan
set from [email protected]
set use_from = yes
set envelope_from = "yes"
set sendmail="/usr/bin/Postfix"

set spoolfile = /var/spool/mail/ghassan

set folder = "~/Mail"
set record = "+sent"
set postponed = "+postponed"

Contents of .procmailrc is the following:

#Environment variable assignments

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
VERBOSE=off
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmaillog

#Recipes
:0:
* ^TOmutt-user
mutt

ls -ld /var/spool/mail/ghassan returns the following:

-rw-rw---- 1 ghassan mail 27556 Apr 16 12:46 /var/spool/mail/ghassan

while head -1 /var/spool/mail/ghassan does not return anything.

Answer 1

This is a problem:

head -1 /var/spool/mail/ghassan does not return anything.

The first line of /var/spool/mail/ghassan must be one that starts with From (that's the word From followed by a space, not a colon) and looks a little like this:

From [email protected] Mon Apr 20 09:48:02 2015

You may find that this is the second or third line in the file; delete the leading blank lines from the spool file and try again. (If you're concerned about doing this and destroying the mailbox, run cp -p /var/spool/mail/ghassan "$HOME/mbox.ghassan" first.)