[OwlBoy]

My terminal says that I have new mail when I make a new shell...

What would be causing this...

-Owl

[fat mac moron]

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
My terminal says that I have new mail when I make a new shell...

What would be causing this...

-Owl

Do you have a .bashrc or .bash_login in your home directory? It sounds like a shell script is calling "mail" a unix util to tell you if you have any messages.

[OwlBoy]

nope just .bash_history

Does this talk to Apple's Mail if that is it?

-Owl

[Earth Mk. II]

it means you have some sort of message from the system in your user's mail queue.

you can read the messages using mail but if you don't want to see them anymore, you can change the "MAILSERVER=-AUTOMATIC-" line in /etc/hostconfig to "MAILSERVER=-NO-".

That'll keep the system from sending your user (or any others) mail messages.

[Moonray]

Just read the mail and see what it tells.

-

[[APi]TheMan]

It's probably the cron daemon calling to you from down under. But seriously, I've gotten "mail" from the cron daemon from time to time.

[OwlBoy]

hmm, its from Folding@home

cron messages.

interesting.

-Owl

[ScotHamedia]

Reading mesages in your terminal is not all that fun, you certainly can do it.

It is normal to see a message that you have mail. It means you have turned postfix on at some point, and you are now getting the email messages.

Something is issuing the command
% mail your_username

There is also mail that is sent to the root account as well, and you will want to pick that up.

First, create a file in ~ called .forward, and in that file enter in a email address where you want these messages sent off to.

Next, gain root and edit the .forward in roots ~ You will see this file is set to /dev/null so your system reports are getting nuked. Edit the /dev/null/ to send them to a normal email address.

Since there are already some messages waiting there for you that will not have been forwarded, you can read those by issuing the command mail in the terminal.