after executed the mail command!

[leyearn]

after i executed the mail command
the following message was produced
Warning: Too many letters, overflowing letters concatenated
after it, too many mails were produced!
and i had to use ctrl+c to stop it!
why?

[Steven E. Protter]

mail command?

elm perhaps?

Have we not been checking our email lately?

If you have too many messages for the client to handle, such a message is possible.

Consider rm the mail file for the user in /var/mail Then don't forget to recreate it with touch and have the permissions correct.

SEP

[Graham Cameron_1]

Just to elaborate on the previous post.
If you haven't read your mail for a long time, or if you have received a large number of mail messages, then the "mail" program cannot handle the volume of mail and behaves as you have described.

The mail file will be in /var/mail/YOURID, if you do ls -l on this file you can see how big it is.

You can use "elm", which is a friendlier mail front end, and which can handle the higher volume. It displays each mail header and gives you options to delete all, delete by pattern, etc.

Or if you know that the mail can be safely removed, you can just zero the file, using "> /var/mail/YOURID".

-- Graham

[TSaliba]

hi
may because you have a lot mail.
may be you need to delete some or all mail

[Bill Hassell]

Start by looking at the mailbox file. Use:

wc /etc/mail/$LOGNAME

This will report: #lines #words #bytes for the mailbox. If this file is massive, you probably have some repeating job sending messages to this mailbox. If it is just a few megs, use vi to edit the file and delete any repeating messages at the end. HINT: move down until you see the repeating messages, then issue a delete from current line to end with :.,$d which will delete from the current line to the end. Make sure the cursor is on a line *above* the next From line.

If none of the messages are useful, you can just zero the file:

cat /dev/null > /etc/mail/$LOGNAME

but you'll still have to stop the process(es) sending mail to this user.