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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?

quack quixote
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3 Answers3

44

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.

Catherine
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dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
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    Or `d *` for *all* messages. – Nikolai N Fetissov Jun 06 '10 at 02:02
  • how do I make it so it doesn't say "You have new mail" every time I execute a command in the terminal? –  Jun 06 '10 at 02:31
  • 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 Jun 06 '10 at 02:46
  • 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 Jun 06 '10 at 02:47
  • 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. –  Jun 06 '10 at 05:38
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    make sure you type "q" or you deletions will not be saved (i was typing "x" like a moron for 10 mins) – longda Oct 25 '12 at 17:26
21

In your ~/.bashrc add:

unset MAILCHECK
Dennis Williamson
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    that won't help in getting rid of the file – line-o Aug 23 '13 at 22:37
  • `~/.bash_profile` in Mavericks – geotheory Jul 01 '14 at 06:56
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    @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 – user72923 Jul 09 '14 at 18:51
  • For the fish shell, add `set --erase MAILCHECK` in `~/.config/fish/config.fish`. – Nick Nov 11 '18 at 08:29
  • Unsetting `MAILCHECK` doesn't seem to work on bash 4.4.12. Any ideas? – 1.61803 Dec 15 '18 at 22:22
  • @1.61803: I just tested it in Bash 4.4.12 and it works for me. – Dennis Williamson Dec 15 '18 at 22:58
  • As per `bash` man page, I tried `unset MAILCHECK` and `export MAILCHECK=-1`, no dice. – 1.61803 Dec 16 '18 at 21:31
  • @1.61803: So after that you were still getting "You have new mail" messages in the same terminal that you entered that command? – Dennis Williamson Dec 17 '18 at 04:40
  • 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 Dec 17 '18 at 19:30
  • @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. – Dennis Williamson Dec 17 '18 at 19:53
  • I mean, since I unset it, `cron` jobs don't show anymore in `mail`, it's empty. – 1.61803 Dec 18 '18 at 22:34
  • @1.61803 Something else is causing that. You'll need to investigate what. And maybe ask a new question here or on unix.se. – Dennis Williamson Dec 18 '18 at 22:36
5

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
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  • 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 Jan 15 '18 at 15:25