Cleaning up root's mailbox

[MAD_2]

Anyone can tell me the correct way to clean up saved messages of root's mailbox (messages that were already read but are now stored in mbox). Also, where do I specify where the mbox can be placed, currently ours is right under "/" and I want to move it to a different location, to a filesystem where we have more space.

Thanks,

[Volker Borowski]

Hello,

did you try to use "elm" as a starter ?
It is menu driven and a lot more comfortable than "mail".

Hope this helps
Volker

[MAD_2]

What I want to do is actually to remove saved messages in the "mbox", not read current mail. The mbox is right now stored under "/" and has messages that date to a few months ago, I want to do some cleanup of this mbox. I am not sure if I can simply us vi to delete the messages; I am certain there must be a way to get back to these to remove them by some kind of category (like from this date to that date, or those with subject line of... etc.)

[Volker Borowski · Accepted solution]

Hi again,

http://www-finmath.uchicago.edu/Resources/mathlab_help/mail.html

What about the "-f" option ?
Volker

[Frank Slootweg]

It looks like you are using mail(1) as you mail client. I advise to (at least) use mailx(1). mailx allows you to specify the location of your mbox. See the MBOX environment variable. Note that this, despite what the term implies, is a mailx *internal* variable, set in your .mailrc file.

[Santosh Nair_1]

As far as I know, you can move the mbox file anywhere, its self contained. And as already mentioned, you can use the -f option to specify the file that you want to read from and if you're using mailx, then the location of the mbox file can be specified in the MBOX environment variable.

-Santosh

[Darrell Allen]

Hi,

As others indicate:

mailx -f /mbox

man mailx for more info.

Darrell