Sponsored Content
Operating Systems AIX /var/spool/mail/<username> files' content wipeout impact Post 302906370 by rbatte1 on Thursday 19th of June 2014 06:58:18 AM
Old 06-19-2014
Have a read of the manual pages for the mail command. Whilst you can just remove the files, these are likely diagnostic messages that you should read.

If you have cron jobs and they create output or errors that would go to the screen, these are mailed to the id running the command. Other things that might go are automated diagnostics, hardware alerts, full disk alerts etc.

Sign on as the id owning the mailbox and run the command mail with no parameters to read the mail.

2Gb of text only email for root is a lot. You need to find out why you are getting it. Similarly, oracle having 900Mb is vast, so something it wrong.



Robin
 

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

in var/spool/mail, same entry with different users....

i am on aix, in the /var/spool/mail ,i have an entry as below, after doing a ls -ltr -rw-rw---- 1 ai mail 3898 Sep 02 11:26 mei -rw-rw---- 1 root mail 22900 Nov 08 14:55 root shouldnt the ai and mei be the same just like root, root? thanks (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: yls177
2 Replies

2. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How safe is it to remove files(/var/spool/mail)?

How safe is it to remove these spooler mail files. I need to make some room in the /usr directory? Any ideas? thanks (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: larcom61
2 Replies

3. Solaris

how to forward mail in /var/mail/username to external mail

Dear All, Now I use solaris 10 and I try to forward mail from /var/mail/username to their external mail so what should I do? thank u in advance (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: unitipon
2 Replies

4. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How do I read mail in /var/spool/mail?

How can I read mail sent to /var/spool/mail? I do not have pine installed so forget about that...is there some generic utility I can use? (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: mojoman
3 Replies

5. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

/VAR/SPOOL/MAIL question

Hi, We have all the user account in a home direcory where their mail is stored and retrieved by email clients. We do however have /var/spool/mail with all the user accounts in it as well Our sendmail.cf is configured to use /var/spool/mqueue as the queue so .what is /var/spool/mail being used... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: mojoman
3 Replies

6. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Sendmail /VAR/SPOOL/MAIL

Hi, First Question: In our company our users have their mailboxes in /var/spool/mail When I look at the users file it seems as if every email sent/received is in that user file! Is this because IMAP is being used or is that just how sendmail works? Second Question: How is that when I create... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: mojoman
3 Replies

7. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

/var/spool/mail

Hi, How can i get my mail on either /var/spool/mail or /var/mail? I use mail and sendmail command to send mail. But everytime I send mail it comes to my outlook inbox and when I check with mail command I get the message "No mail for siba". (Note siba is my user Id.) (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: siba.s.nayak
2 Replies

8. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

mail is not sent, instead just coping into /var/spool/queue dir

Hi, I have some problems w/ the sendmail. I see that messages are queued in the /var/spool/mqueue and they are never sent to the recipients. This problem just suddenly started without any modifications in the current configuration. I already started and stop the sendmail and it did not help.... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: ktanya
3 Replies

9. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Mail going to /var/spool/mqueue instead of being sent

Hello, I have a bunch of cron jobs in the crontab. For some reason mail from the cron jobs started going to /var/spool/mqueue instead of being sent. Does anyone know why mail from cron jobs would go to the queue instead of being sent? (9 Replies)
Discussion started by: xadamz23
9 Replies

10. AIX

/var/spool/mail/ issues

Hi My box is running with AIX 6100-06 and Im the root user of this box My /var gets filled up often to 100% When I investigate I find that it is the below file which increases rapidly /var/spool/mail/pdgadmin I dont know why this file is growing up. Can any one assist me on this.... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: samsungsamsung
2 Replies
mailcompat(1)							   User Commands						     mailcompat(1)

NAME
mailcompat - provide SunOS compatibility for Solaris mailbox format DESCRIPTION
mailcompat is a program to provide SunOS 4.x compatability for the Solaris mailbox format. You would typically run mailcompat to be able to read mail on a workstation running SunOS 4.x when your mail server is running Solaris. Enabling mailcompat creates an entry in your .forward file, if it exists. If this file does not exist, mailcompat will create it. Dis- abling mailcompat will remove the entry from the .forward file, and if this was the only entry, will remove the entire file. To execute mailcompat, log onto the Solaris mail server and enter mailcompat on the command line. Answer the queries provided by the pro- gram. USAGE
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of mailcompat when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2^31 bytes). EXAMPLES
Example 1 Examples of the mailcompat feature. The following example enables the mailcompat feature for the user "john". example% mailcompat This program can be used to store your mail in a format that you can read with SunOS 4.X based mail readers To enable the mailcompat feature a ".forward" file is created. Would you like to enable the mailcompat feature? Y Mailcompat feature ENABLED.Run mailcompat with no arguments to remove it example% The following example disables the mailcompat feature for the user "john". example% mailcompat This program can be used to store your mail in a format that you can read with SunOS 4.X based mail readers You have a .forward file in your home directory containing: "|/usr/bin/mailcompat johns" Would you like to remove it and disable the mailcompat feature? y Back to normal reception of mail. example% FILES
~/.forward list of recipients for forwarding messages ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
mailx(1), attributes(5), largefile(5) SunOS 5.11 4 Aug 1994 mailcompat(1)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 08:54 AM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy