You have mail message in terminal os X

Question

Few days ago I got this message in my terminal window     What does that mean  I ve never seen that before   That was messages from xCode bots      Thanks for the help

User · Accepted Answer

Probably it is some message from your system   Type in terminal   man mail     and see how can you get this message from your system

User · Answer

It means that a process or script you have created is sending mail to an account on your local machine  for example  a mail server running on localhost application    Manage this mail with these commands   t  lt message list gt         type messages n                       goto and type next message e  lt message list gt         edit messages f  lt message list gt         give head lines of messages d  lt message list gt         delete messages s  lt message list gt         file append messages to file u  lt message list gt         undelete messages R  lt message list gt         reply to message senders r  lt message list gt         reply to message senders and all recipients pre  lt message list gt       make messages go back to  var mail m  lt user list gt            mail to specific users q                       quit  saving unresolved messages in mbox x                       quit  do not remove system mailbox h                       print out active message headers                         shell escape cd  directory           chdir to directory or home if none given   A  consists of integers  ranges of same  or user names separated by spaces   If omitted  Mail uses the last message typed   A  consists of user names or aliases separated by spaces  Aliases are defined in  mailrc in your home directory

User · Answer

I was also having this issue of  quot You have mail quot  coming up every time I started Terminal  What I discovered is this  Something I d installed  not entirely sure what  but possibly a script or something associated with an Alfred Workflow  at a guess   made a change to the OS X system to start presenting Terminal bash notifications  Prior to that  it appears Wordpress had attempted to use the Local Mail system to send a message  The message bounced  due to it having an invalid Recipient address  The bounced message then ended up in the local system mail inbox  So Terminal  bash  was then notifying me that  quot You have mail quot   You can access the mail by simply using the command mail  This launches you into Mail  and it will right away show you a list of messages that are stored there  If you want to see the content of the first message  use t  This will show you the content of the first message  in full  You ll need to scroll down through the message to view it all  by hitting the down-arrow key  If you want to jump to the end of the message  use the spacebar  If you want to abort viewing the message  use q   To view the next message in the queue use n      assuming there s more than one message  NOTE  You need to use these commands at the mail   command prompt  They won t work whilst you are in the process of viewing a message  Hitting n whilst viewing a message will just cause an error message related to regular expressions  So  if in the midst of viewing a message  hit q to quit from that  or hit spacebar to jump to the end of the message  and then at the   prompt  hit n  Viewing the content of the messages in this way may help you identify what attempted to send the message s   You can also view a specific message by just inputting its number at the   prompt  3  for instance  will show you the content of the third message  if there are that many in there   DELETING MESSAGES Use the d command  at the   command prompt   d  message number   To delete each message when you are done looking at them  For example  d 2 will delete message number 2  Or you can delete a list of messages  such as d 1 2 5 7  Or you can delete a range of messages with  for example   d 3-10  You can find the message numbers in the list of messages mail shows you  To delete all the messages  from the mail prompt     use the command d    As per a comment on this post  you will need to use q to quit mail  which also saves any changes  If you d like to see the mail all in one output  use this command at the bash prompt  i e  not from within mail  but from your regular command prompt   cat  var mail  lt username gt   And  if you wish to delete the emails all in one hit  use this command sudo rm  var mail  lt username gt   In my particular case  there were a number of messages  It looks like the one was a returned message that bounced  It was sent by a local Wordpress installation  It was a notification for when user  quot Admin quot   me  changed its password  Two additional messages where there  Both seemed to be to the same incident  What I don t know  and can t answer for you either  is WHY I only recently started seeing this mail notification each time I open Terminal  The mails were generated a couple of months ago  and yet I only noticed this  quot you have mail quot  appearing in the last few weeks  I suspect it s the result of something a workflow I installed in Alfred  and that workflow using Terminal bash to provide notifications    or something along those lines  Simply deleting the messages If you have no interest in determining the source of the messages  and just wish to get rid of them  it may be easier to do so without using the mail command  which can be somewhat fiddly   As pointed out by a few other people  you can use this command instead  sudo rm  var mail YOURUSERNAME

User · Answer

As inspiredlife explained  you can figure out whats happening using mail command   If you don t want to delete bunch of unrelated   auto-generated messages one by one  like me   simply run the command below to get rid of all messages   echo -n  gt   var mail yourusername

User · Answer

If you don t want the hassle of using mail  you can read the mail with  cat  var mail  lt username gt    and delete the mail with  sudo rm  var mail  lt username gt

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