Safely get rid of "You have new mail in /var/mail" on a Mac?

macos email unix terminal sendmail

24,185

Solution 1

The old school way is to open a terminal and use

mail

at the prompt, then

to delete one message or

d1-4

for for four messages.

Then

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.

Solution 2

In your ~/.bashrc add:

unset MAILCHECK

Solution 3

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

24,185

quack quixote

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

quack quixote over 1 year

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?
- Nikolai N Fetissov almost 14 years
  
  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 almost 14 years

Or d * for all messages.
mattbornski almost 14 years

how do I make it so it doesn't say "You have new mail" every time I execute a command in the terminal?
joaquin almost 14 years

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.
mattbornski almost 14 years

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.
longda over 11 years

make sure you type "q" or you deletions will not be saved (i was typing "x" like a moron for 10 mins)
line-o over 10 years

that won't help in getting rid of the file
user72923 almost 10 years

@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: joshstaiger.org/archives/2005/07/bash_profile_vs.html
abathur over 6 years

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.
Nick over 5 years

For the fish shell, add set --erase MAILCHECK in ~/.config/fish/config.fish.
1.61803 over 5 years

Unsetting MAILCHECK doesn't seem to work on bash 4.4.12. Any ideas?
Dennis Williamson over 5 years

@1.61803: I just tested it in Bash 4.4.12 and it works for me.
1.61803 over 5 years

As per bash man page, I tried unset MAILCHECK and export MAILCHECK=-1, no dice.
Dennis Williamson over 5 years

@1.61803: So after that you were still getting "You have new mail" messages in the same terminal that you entered that command?
1.61803 over 5 years

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.
Dennis Williamson over 5 years

@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.
1.61803 over 5 years

I mean, since I unset it, cron jobs don't show anymore in mail, it's empty.
Dennis Williamson over 5 years

@1.61803 Something else is causing that. You'll need to investigate what. And maybe ask a new question here or on unix.se.