I wanted to setup a mail service on a staging server that would send all outgoing emails to a local mailbox. This avoids sending emails out to real users when running the staging server using production data.

First, install the postfix mail server:

apt install postfix

and choose the "Local only" mail server configuration type.

Then change the following in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

default_transport = error

to:

default_transport = local:root

and restart postfix:

systemctl restart postfix.service

Once that's done, you can find all of the emails in /var/mail/root.

So you can install mutt:

apt install mutt

and then view the mailbox like this:

mutt -f /var/mail/root