A friend of mine is switching his email from one University server to a different one. He is using the tcsh, and on his current server, the shell will tell him (when the prompt is displayed) if there is new mail. The new server, where he also has the tcsh, does not do this by default. I got him to do this:
alias precmd "if ( -e $MAIL ) if ( ! ( -z $MAIL ) ) echo You have mail."
where $MAIL expands to /var/mail/my-friends-login-name
He poked around, and that is indeed where his mail is stored. The alias is in his .aliases file. It (the alias) seems to be working, but there is a problem. The string "You have mail." is getting echoed every time the prompt is printed, as if he had new mail all the time, except that he doesn't. So I guess the if statement I told him to use is not correct. I am by no means a tcsh guy, so I am not sure of what I am missing here.