On Slackware, after a fresh install, your root account gets a welcome message. The default way to read that, is with the command line program mail. Log in as root and type mail. However, I hate this program. Its interface is horrible.
There are other instances when root gets mail that you may want to read as well. Perhaps you could configure Pine, or even Thunderbird to read those messages? Turns out, no need at all. The format of those messages is in plain mbox format, and when you open those in gvim, you'll get nice syntax highlighting that makes for easy reading. Just su root; gvim /var/mail/root and start reading. BTW apache may receive mail as well.
If your vim or gvim is not configured, maybe syntax highlighting is off. You can enable it with: <esc> :syntax enable or <esc> :syn on . In gvim different color schemes can be chosen from the menu Edit / Color schemes. Vim should detect mbox files as mail without problem, but you can set it manually with <esc> :set syn=mail. More information on these commands is in the help files of vim itself: <esc> :h syntax.
