Recently I discovered a mysterious message showing up in every new Terminal window I opened under OS X. The notice simply read “You have new mail”:

You Have New Mail in OS X Terminal

First I thought this was something that had been put in the Terminal’s startup message (called motd – Message of the Day, which can be edited with “$ pico /etc/motd”). However, this was not the case.
KTJGPTNURUHF
Fortunately a short web-search delivered the answer and solution to this strange occurrence: the message is a part of the built-in Unix mail processing system, called “mail” or “mailx”.

This application provides a functionality called “sendmail” which is commonly used in website development to generate an e-mail, for example in a contact form. And this was also the reason why I had that suspicious mail notice in my Terminal.

How to get rid of those messages

By using the follwing Terminal command, you will receive an overview of the mail messages – namely the mail inbox:

$ mailx #launches the unix mail app
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/user": 1 message 1 unread
>U  1 MAILER-DAEMON@...  Mon Feb  8 21:41  81/2505  "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender"
?

The prefix “U” stands for “Unread”. There are other prefixes such as “N” = New and “> ” = Read.
From here you can use now several commands to handle the messages (display the list using “?”):

? ? [RETURN]
Command
Description
t
type messages
n
goto and type next message
e
edit messages
f
give head lines of messages
d
delete messages
s
file append messages to file
u
undelete messages
R
reply to message senders
r
reply to message senders and all recipients
pre
make messages go back to /var/mail
m
mail to specific users
q
quit, saving unresolved messages in mbox
x
quit, do not remove system mailbox
h
print out active message headers

Most commonly you might want to read the message(s) and/or delete them. To do so, type:

? message-id [RETURN]
#Use ctrl+v to skip through the message

Afterwards simply use the following command to delete a message:

? d message-id [RETURN]

Further reading

  1. Type $ man mail into the Terminal
  2. History of mail, Mail, mailx & nail
  3. mailx & mail on Wikipedia
Share:
  • 0
  • 1

Questions? Suggestions? Let us know with a comment!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.