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Re: How to stop local mail..



On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 12:16:11AM -0700, Leo Spalteholz wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> 
>     Leo Spalteholz wrote:
>       
>    
>         I was looking through my drive trying to figure out what was taking up 
>         so much space when I stumbled across my mail file in /var/mail/.  It was 
>         over 800MB!
>         It contained a ton of output from the command line: errors, commands 
>         typed, program output etc..  Most of it was the output from the yes 
>         command when I accidentally ran it in the background once and didn't 
>         notice for a while :P.  Why would it send stuff like that to my user 
>         account?  How do I stop it?
>             
>    
>     But in asking such a question any reply such as this one seems futile.
>     If you are not reading your email then you will not get this reply
>     either.  Not reading your email how do you expect to read any
>     responses to your question?
>     
>     Bob
> 
> No I think you misunderstood me.  This is only local mail.  I am checking my
> regular email through Mozilla.  This is something else.  Seems to be just mail
> from local users.  For example I get mail from root@localhost or leo@localhost.

So, Mozilla must be directly pulling mail from your ISP's mail server.
I would guess that the more common practice is to use fetchmail or
getmail to pull the mail from the ISP into the local machine, which then
ends up in /var/mail.  It should be possible to add the local mailbox in
question into Mozilla, then you can periodically scan it for anything of
interest, or just delete the files.  If everything is going "normally",
you shouldn't get that much automatically generated mail (a few cron
jobs and that's about it).  I don't know the specifics of how to add the
mailbox into Mozilla, but should be fairly self explanatory...

- Chris


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