Re: A few random comments and a little confusion

[John Bridleman <jbridleman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's more than likely messages generated from a cron job. Once you log in 
as root just type "mail" and you should be able to read the output from the 
cron jobs.

At 09:59 PM 4/27/00 -0400, you wrote:

>Whenever I login as root on my box, I am informed that I "have mail."
>This is odd, seeing as I have yet to successfully connect to the
>internet nor, at the time, had I even started a single e-mail program.
>When I log out, I am once again informed that I have mail, and further
>information concerning the location (/var/spool/mail/root) is also
>disclosed.  I used multiple mail programs, including pine, to check my
>e-mail and I they all say I have none.  One mail indicator program,
>however, said simply "2" while the other said nothing...So, at the
>advice of Jon Sanders, I checked var/spool/mail/root with a text editor
>and got some jumbo about not deleting the stuff in there, please,
>because I would lose folder configuration, and anyways, if I _did_
>delete it no good would be done because it would all just come back when
>I started another mail program.  Therefore, I deleted the contents.
>When I logged in again, I was once again greeted with "You have mail."
>*sigh*  I double checked, and since I hadn't run any mail programs the
>file was still empty.  I stated another mail program, which once again
>said I had no mail.  /var/spool/mail/root remained empty.  Then I
>decided to run another mail program to re-create this file.  However,
>K's mail client did not recreate it, and pine said it was in the wrong
>format.  I deleted it, then ran pine again in the hopes that it would
>create it again in the correct format.  No such luck, there is no longer
>a /var/spool/mail/root.  I _did_ get rid of that pesky "you have mail"
>message, though.  What should I do and can someone explain this all?  It
>wasn't exactly too smooth of me to be doing all this without really
>knowing whats going on, but at least I'm learning and haven't really
>hurt anything, I guess.  Did I break an;ything?  It's not really a major
>problem, just something I'm interested in understanding as I wade my way
>through the world of linux. Thanks,
>
>-Josh