How do I delete all Terminal mail?

Question

I set up a cronjob a long time ago that now doesn't exist. Whenever I open up Terminal, it now says "You have mail". I have something like 100 messages that all say the same thing. How do I mass delete all of the messages?

I wasn't even aware an MTA was built into OS X. Though now that I think about it, frankly I'm not surprised. — Jason Salaz, Oct 21 '11 at 22:48
Mail Transfer Agent. When in doubt, Wikipedia. I know of, at least, MTAs, MSAs, MDAs, and MUAs. — Jason Salaz, Feb 01 '12 at 04:27

score 330 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 11 '23 at 13:02

330

Launch the UNIX mail utility by running the following at the command prompt (in e.g. Terminal.app):

$ mail

You'll see a list of all your messages. From the mail prompt, do

? delete *
? q

And that should be it. Make sure to enter q after the delete * command. This will save the changes to disk.

edited Jul 11 '23 at 13:02

Community

1

answered Oct 21 '11 at 21:40

chrismanderson

5,825

At first I didn't know what mail app mean. To anyone who is having same trouble, "It is a command". Just go type it in terminal and you will get an interactive app running there. +1 Thank you – Nabin Mar 18 '17 at 12:15
1

You can use del 1 where 1 is the message number too in case you need to keep some email for debugging purposes. – Fadli Saad Jan 27 '19 at 07:31
kept following other answers but used exit to quit and would not work. Thanks for mentioning the q option. – frezq Aug 24 '19 at 01:21
3

Anyone else visit this answer monthly? – Tom Oct 14 '20 at 19:09
d * also works – dcsan Jul 03 '23 at 18:56
Thank you for the answer, it works on my macOS 13.4 – xinbenlv Sep 10 '23 at 20:59

score 18 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 22 '11 at 14:41

18

You may also go the direct route and just run : > /var/mail/$USER to empty the mail file.

PS: Deleting the mail file requires sudo, just setting it to empty is enough.

answered Oct 22 '11 at 14:41

nohillside

100,768

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited May 04 '20 at 11:13

5

I want to reinforce clearly one point how command [delete *],[q] really helped me out in this case.

I set a cron job to run like every day in 2018 (if I recall correctly) and forgot about it.

Now I realized to check and I discovered 3000 messages in my mailbox! Note to others that a quick edit can pile up reports rapidly.

edited May 04 '20 at 11:13

bmike

235,889

answered May 04 '20 at 10:30

PICNICSINSPACE

51

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 24 '19 at 14:42

4

I know this post is old, but I want to contribute with an answer.

to delete your mail messages do the following:

sudo rm /var/mail/[user]

And in order to the question, I suggest you do the following to each crontab you do not want to send an email notification (this way your mail will not have mails)

* * * * * /path/to/script.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

or

* * * * * command > /dev/null 2>&1

answered Sep 24 '19 at 14:42

Jorge

41

1

Notice that you should probably not drop stderr (FD 2). You usually want to be notified about errors so this is something which should be accessible. – Mathias Brodala Aug 27 '20 at 08:56

How do I delete all Terminal mail?

4 Answers4