Terminal: "you new have mail"

I recently re-used an old script and put it into cron. After testing a few things in the terminal, I saw "You have new mail". Typing in "mail" showed me a list (reminded me a lot of the old "pine" program from my earlier UNIX days). Since these trap errors in the crontab, I would actually like to see them for as long as the cron job is scheduled. Is there a way to forward them? I recall from long ago using a .vacation or .forward file or something like that, but assuming I used either to forward it to my gmail account, I would also need an internet connection, right? Or will it just queue up until I have a connection and then send a la sendmail? I use the default Mac Mail program... is it possible to read my "local" mail from Mac Mail? I also recall having this issue on Linux and doing something to have local system mail for root go to a real mailbox. But A) I don't recall what I did and B) it was on servers that always had internet connections so I could safely redirect system emails for root out to my work account. Can someone remind me the old school ways to resolve this and see the local emails?

 

I recalled that I used to fix this for root on Linux servers by editing /etc/aliases and then running 'newaliases'. However, this requires a 24x7 internet connection or the email(s) will queue up. So I guess I have 2 questions:

1) is there any reason I couldn't use /etc/aliases to fix this on my Mac? I'm thinking something like:

Open Terminal
'sudo su -'
'vi /etc/aliases' and add an entry for my account (ass: hole@gmail.com)
'newaliases'

2) since this would be internet connection dependent as well as dependent on the system being on (not always a guarantee on a laptop), is it possible to read the local mail file from Mac Mail? Or maybe from an alternative client like Thunderbird?