How to disable mail for users

[Brian West]

We have HP-UX 10.20 with users running an application without having direct access to the shell and mail.

My question is, how to disable mail for all users on the localhost and would it be safe to just delete all the files under /var/mail for all users except root, without causing any problems or error messages.

Thanks,

Elias

[Stefan Farrelly]

Yes, its fine do delete all the mail files in /var/mail, and to disable mail simply stop the sendmail daemon running.
Set> export SENDMAIL_SERVER=0 in /etc/rc.config.d/mailservs
then do> /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop

[Brian West]

I want to disable mail for all users except root.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Well, so much for stopping sendmail then. You need to leave it running.

Only 2 ways to reroute mail for all users except root;
1. in each users home dir create a .forward file which forwards their mail to someone else, eg root, or to nobody (which is setup in the /etc/mail/aliases file as /dev/null)
2. List every user in the /etc/mail/aliases file and point them to nobody, eg. user1,user2,user3.... : nobody (which reroutes to /dev/null) Then do a newaliases command.