setting a cron job

[Jamie Griffin]

Hi

I also wanted to ask how i can set a cron job to poll mail at, say, 5 minute intervals. 

I found an article which says to use 'crontab -e' and add an appropriate line to a text file. However, when i tried this i had a strange error message so aborted the process. I wasn't sure if the given method was for another linux distribution or not. 

does anyone know the best way to do this? 

Thanks in advance, Jamie