purging old mail
Jonathan McKeown
jonathan at hst.org.za
Fri Jun 1 12:28:20 UTC 2007
On Friday 01 June 2007 14:11, Steve Bertrand wrote:
> mats.lindberg at se.transport.bombardier.com wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I'm setting up a FreeBSD 5.4 system that need to run unattended for a
> > year or more.
> > I've noticed that the /var/mail/root file grows a bit over time.
> >
> > Do I need to configure the system in some way to prevent this file from
> > growing indefinately, filling up the /var partition?
>
> Are you actually interested in reading root mail?
>
> Are you running sendmail?
>
> If so, in the /etc/mail/aliases file, change the root alias to an email
> address that someone actually POP's.
>
> If you don't want to read the email at all, change the root alias to
> point to /dev/null.
What I've been caught by a couple of times is the periodic(8) routines, which
quickly fill roots mailbox with daily, weekly and monthly status reports.
If you're not going to forward these to a real user but still want to keep
(some of) them available, put
daily_output="/var/log/daily.log"
weekly_output="/var/log/weekly.log"
monthly_output="/var/log/monthly.log"
in /etc/periodic.conf. The relevant reports will be logged into the respective
files, and newsyslog already knows to rotate these if they exist, so they
won't grow endlessly (by default, /etc/newsyslog.conf keeps a week of dailys,
5 weeks of weeklys and a year of monthlys).
Jonathan
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