UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm not a Linux newbie but this seemed like a pretty n00b question. I am familiar with Postfix/Dovecot setups but now I am looking for the simplest way to access mail on a Linux system, such as the mail that goes to /var/mail/root. I know I can edit /etc/aliases and have the system mail go straight to my mail box but the problem is that my email provider requires the sending server to have a valid PTR or it gets rejected. Adding a PTR is not an option because I am using Windows Azure.

It's just a little Red Hat server. I was thinking about setting up Courier-IMAP and authenticate to /etc/shadow (of course, I'd be checking the mail with a user other than root) to access the mail, but is there a simpler way? I know I can check it with mail command but I want to read it in my mail client, on my personal computer. I know I can run my own mail server where I can control relay access but that would be overkill for this single server.

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestions. I should have made the subject say "remote email client." I do not run GUIs on my servers so Xserver is not an option. Basically I have a Linux server in Windows' Cloud and I'm trying to read the logs from my house using Thunderbird. I'm so far thinking Courier-IMAP since it's the lightest IMAP client I've worked with.

Can you automount your remote mail dir to local system and access emails just like local email on thunderbird ?

I take it your client machine is Windows? There are open source Samba, NFS, SSH clients to move files from there to here.

XServer would run on the client box (X is backwards that way, it serves the eyeball), so remote X mail clients could be run from there. The mail never leaves the LINUX box, but you read it with an X client running there and displaying here.

Ok thanks a lot. I didn't really get too many answers in other places I posted. Out of all the options I think just setting up Courier-IMAP would be the easiest. But it actually looks like my email provider has begun accepting email from my server so it looks like I no longer need a solution to this. Thanks for the help!

Maybe your DNS PTR became valid, so client reverse lookup at the server succeeded?