[AWShuttleworth]

Look at the third line in this image.



What could this be from? I don't remember installing anything that should be doing this.

I wouldn't mind so much, except that I don't like my system resources being used frivolously, and it always says I have new mail, whether I do or not.

Help me make it stop!

[suthercd]

Enter 'mail' at the prompt. Should tell you that there is a message, probably from the system. Mail returns the header of each message. 'mail -d' will delete messages. Enter 'man mail' to get the syntax.

Once you have read (to figure out where it/they came from) and deleted the messages, the notification should stop unless yoiu installed something that is configured to send you notices this way.

HTH
Craig

[AWShuttleworth]

Aha. Thanks a lot. I didn't realize that this was part of the system.

What is the mail function generally used for?

[wadesworld]

Originally posted by AWShuttleworth:
Aha. Thanks a lot. I didn't realize that this was part of the system.

What is the mail function generally used for?

Um, sending and receiving mail? It's a command-line mail client after all. Mail sent locally on the system to your Unix account name shows up there.

What's likely happening is a cron script is running and producing output. That output gets mailed to the owner of the cron job.

You have three choices:

1) Change the cron job to write its output to the console, log file, or /dev/null (meaning throw it away)

2) Use the command-line client to periodically read and delete the messages

3) Setup postfix on your machine so that mail for your "Unix account" is redirected to your real email address.

Wade