I've been using the simple Linux getmail utility to download emails from a POP email site and storing them in some directory. Great as an archive.

Now I'd like to be able to view the emails on some web based mail software.

I thought SquirrelMail might do the job and installed it. The software wants to act as an imap server or at least wants to make connection to a local imap server.I would prefer that Squirrelmail just displayed the downloaded emails

Is this an appropriate way to just get it to display email already down loaded and not try to go and get it itself or should I think about another way.

Squirrelmail is an imap client, not a server, and yes, it needs a server to connect to.
Which mailbox format are you using? mbox or Maildir? If Maildir, SqWebMail should work. It is a web interface that "accesses maildirs directly, and does not use an IMAP server".

Please let us know if that works for you.

Took a while to get to this what with Christmas.

After a little Googling sqwebmail seem like a good option.
I used apt-get to install sqwebmail and all that seemed to go fine.
Afterwards I could find the local sqwebmail web site even though png file were symbolically linked from /usr/share/sqwebmail into my web directory. Again Googling I find others had a similar problem.

Looks like I'll have to format mail to be compatible with sqwebmail but that's okay.

With a little more work I can figure this out. I'm a little short on time today, this is sort of a courtesy update. Thanks for your response, I'll post again when I figure it out.