Terminal "You have new mail"

[thedoobs]

Sometimes when I open Terminal, it has a "You have new mail" message at the top to the terminal prompt. It seems that this appears after a ClamXAV scan. I have no clue how to read these mail messages, other than typing "mail" at the terminal. What are the commands that I need to use in order to check these mail messages at the terminal?

[yellow]

Yes, this is a rather annoying behavior of clam that doesn't appear in any of the guified preferences.

Use "mailx" to "get" the mail and then delete it.

Use "man mailx" to get some idea how to use it.

[ganbustein]

I wouldn't delete those messages out of hand. ClamXAV (or whoever sent them) sent them to you for a reason. Actually, any cron task that produces output and/or exits with a non-zero status will send you mail.

man mail will tell you your options. To begin reading your mail, type mail. From within mail, your most useful commands are:

? - Get help
p - Print the current message (to the screen)
d - Delete the current message (and go to the next one)
n - Next message (without deleting the current one) and print
q - Quit (all undeleted messages are still available to read later)

Refer to man mail for anything more advanced, such as saving mail to a file, but these basic commands should meet most of your needs.

[yellow]

It's just a clone of what the app writes to the clam log (assuming one write to said log).

[Straitsfan]

Just noticed the same with me "you have mail." I was fooling with lp command yesterday and chose this option, but nothing happened. I was wondering -- the message appears with every window I open in Terminal. How do I get it to stop?

[Hal Itosis]

Just noticed the same with me "you have mail." I was fooling with lp command yesterday and chose this option, but nothing happened. I was wondering -- the message appears with every window I open in Terminal. How do I get it to stop?

That typically means some script you wrote is delivering error messages.
Read the mail and find out what the problem is.
Fix the problem and the mail will stop.

[notchris]

in terminal on 10.4.11 i type mail i see a list of 15 new messages
if i press return i see the first message but when i press d nothing does not delete

i have read all of them and its for norton and symantec which i deleted 3 months ago and there are long long messages.

I playing around with scripts on this mac and would appreciate shorting that list and only getting new mail when something i did didn't work but none of the above suggestions work for deleting