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Even if you are planning to use a graphical mail program, it is important that a traditional MTA/MDA is also installed and correctly set up on your Ubuntu system. Reason is that various utilities running on the system2 can send important notices by e-mail to inform the system administrator of (potential) problems or changes.
For this reason the packages exim4 and mutt will be installed by default (provided you did not unse- lect the “standard” task during the installation). exim4 is a combination MTA/MDA that is relatively small but very flexible. By default it will be configured to only handle e-mail local to the system itself and e-mails addressed to the system administrator (root account) will be delivered to the regular user account created during the installation3.
When system e-mails are delivered they are added to a file in /var/mail/account_name. The e-mails can be read using mutt.
2. Examples are: cron, quota, logcheck, aide, . . .
3. The forwarding of mail for root to the regular user account is configured in /etc/aliases. If no regular user account was created, the mail will of course be delivered to the root account itself.