29
8
I was messing around with sendmail in Rails a year ago and have had this message popping up in the terminal after every command ever since:
You have new mail in /var/mail/Lance
How do I properly get rid of that so the message goes away? I ever use any of that functionality and don't have mail on my computer. There's one file in /var/mail called lance, and it's huge. Can I just remove it?
36
The old school way is to open a terminal and use
mail
at the prompt, then
d
to delete one message or
d1-4
for for four messages.
Then
q
to quit.
If you don't want to delete them unread, just type Enter at the mail prompt and it'll show each message in turn.
Use
man mail
for all the details.
Of course, other more sophisticated mail clients may be available, but that will do it.
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
Posted 2010-06-06T01:53:07.117
Reputation: 7 311
15Or d * for all messages. – Nikolai N Fetissov – 2010-06-06T02:02:51.110
how do I make it so it doesn't say "You have new mail" every time I execute a command in the terminal? – None – 2010-06-06T02:31:54.747
Read or delete every message. If there are more and a few, read some of them so you can figure out what process is sending them and make it stop... – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten – 2010-06-06T02:46:51.093
I checked - I had 210 messages waiting, the latest from January 2006, which is before I bought this computer! The data transfer service was thorough. I used d 1-210 quite successfully. I didn't have anything reminding me, though. – Jonathan Leffler – 2010-06-06T02:47:04.503
it says I have 34,000 messages! I have 14,000 in gmail (don't delete all of them because I get 100+ per day, mostly group digests and production app notifications), and some coming from years ago. Thing is, before I messed with 'sendmail', I never got that "you've got mail" message. Now I do. I just want it to go away, can it? Some setting to disable the mail/terminal combo. Don't want to spend the time to sort/delete them. – None – 2010-06-06T05:38:28.983
3make sure you type "q" or you deletions will not be saved (i was typing "x" like a moron for 10 mins) – longda – 2012-10-25T17:26:12.027
20
In your ~/.bashrc add:
unset MAILCHECK
Paused until further notice.
Posted 2010-06-06T01:53:07.117
Reputation: 86 075
~/.bash_profile in Mavericks – geotheory – 2014-07-01T06:56:58.310
3
@geotheory The choice between .bashrc and .bash_profile is not specific to the version of the OS. Rather, it concerns login vs non-login shells. See here for more details: http://www.joshstaiger.org/archives/2005/07/bash_profile_vs.html
For the fish shell, add set --erase MAILCHECK in ~/.config/fish/config.fish. – Nick – 2018-11-11T08:29:41.893
Unsetting MAILCHECK doesn't seem to work on bash 4.4.12. Any ideas? – 1.61803 – 2018-12-15T22:22:32.790
@1.61803: I just tested it in Bash 4.4.12 and it works for me. – Paused until further notice. – 2018-12-15T22:58:43.547
As per bash man page, I tried unset MAILCHECK and export MAILCHECK=-1, no dice. – 1.61803 – 2018-12-16T21:31:06.947
@1.61803: So after that you were still getting "You have new mail" messages in the same terminal that you entered that command? – Paused until further notice. – 2018-12-17T04:40:28.230
I tested again and it seems to completely stop checking for mail (cron messages in my case), whereas I only wanted to suppress the message in the shell. – 1.61803 – 2018-12-17T19:30:57.217
@1.61803: What do you expect a check for mail performed by Bash to do except for notifying you via a message in the shell? Bash doesn't process the mail in any way. In fact the file it checks doesn't even really have to be mail. It just checks for a file to have changed. – Paused until further notice. – 2018-12-17T19:53:07.910
I mean, since I unset it, cron jobs don't show anymore in mail, it's empty. – 1.61803 – 2018-12-18T22:34:09.940
@1.61803 Something else is causing that. You'll need to investigate what. And maybe ask a new question here or on unix.se. – Paused until further notice. – 2018-12-18T22:36:49.203
2that won't help in getting rid of the file – line-o – 2013-08-23T22:37:21.880
4
You can just remove the messages from /var/mail/<user>, but you might get more, for example as the result of cron jobs. You can instead have this mail redirected to the normal place you read and store mail on your machine with a .forward file. Simply create a file called .forward in /Users/<username>/ which contains the filename you wish the mail to be stored in.
e.g. in my case, I pull my mail down from my host using IMAP and store it in /Users/ether/mail/i, so I have a file called /Users/ether/.forward which contains the line: /Users/ether/mail/i
Ether
Posted 2010-06-06T01:53:07.117
Reputation: 1 007
This under-rated answer led me to a good fix for my underlying question, which was how to keep the notification from appearing on macos, because I already know I've got mail. I tried MAILCHECK and other options to no avail, but redirecting the mail to a different file killed these nudges, but still lets me occasionally review cron mail to make sure all is well. – abathur – 2018-01-15T15:25:51.210
Take a look into the file - it holds mail undelivered to the user - and just remove it if you don't find anything useful there. – Nikolai N Fetissov – 2010-06-06T02:02:06.633