checking mail

[Tom Gore]

I have been getting the following message for the last few days when I check root's mail. I am not sure where this is coming from or what to do to get rid of it.

Warning: Too many letters, overflowing letters concatenated

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

cd /var/mail

ll root

Is it huge?

If you have too many messages elm can't deal with it.

If the mail isn't that important:
rm root
touch mail
chown root:mail root

Make the permissions match the other files.

SEP

[Mark Greene_1]

mailx has a limit of 32,000 messages. You can cat /dev/null to root's mail queue (/var/mail/root), but I'd advise looking at the file with pg or more first. My guess is you have a cron job (or jobs) producing mail with error messages several times a night. Finding and fixing the errors will stop the mail messages.

mark

[Tom Gore]

Thanks. I just could not remember where mail was. i wear too many hats around here and haven't had my HP hat on in a while.

[Brian Lee_4]

If the file /var/mail/root is too big,
just run "> root" and it will make the file size to zero without chaning anything.

[lanke_1]

Trim the file
/var/mail/root >root