Sadly, Fedora Core 8 doesn’t ship a packaged version of Thunderbird (2.0.0.9 as of this writing) that includes movemail capabilities. Movemail is the account type (in Thunderbird) that allows you to read mail from your local system (in /var/spool/mail/[username]). If you run cron jobs, you should be getting emails about the status of those jobs in your local mail directory. Instead of having to read them through the command line, I wanted to read them through Thunderbird. Here’s a step-by-step on how to get it working:

1. Download movemail.rdf from the Mozilla repository. This includes the account type ‘Movemail’.
2. Save a copy of movemail.rdf to /usr/lib[64]/thunderbird-2.0.0.9/isp
3. Run the following: chmod 777 /var/spool/mail
4. Restart Thunderbird
5. In Thunderbird when adding a new account, select Movemail as the type, and follow the directions as usual.

All done! Hopefully, future versions of the Thunderbird package in Fedora’s repo. will be updated to include movemail, but until then, this works.