How to stop automatic creation of /var/mail/$USER

[Matt Emmerton]

> On 1/1/07, Sahil Tandon <sahil at tandon.net> wrote:
> > When I 'adduser' a new account, a /var/mail/$USER file is created.  This
is
> > unnecessary as our MTA is configured to deliver mail directly to a
user's
> > ~/Maildir/, where the IMAP server looks by default.
> >
> > There is nothing in the adduser or adduser.conf man pages that explains
how
> > to manipulate (or, in my case, simply stop) the creation of this file.
>
> I do the same. I don't really care about the file, as it's not hurting
> anything.

I looked at the adduser sources and couldn't find anything that explicitly
creates the /var/mail/$USER directory.

Further debugging shows that the "pw useradd" command (see the adduser
subroutine) is what is creating the mail file.

There doesn't seem to be a way from the command-line to have pw *not* create
the mail spool file, although code will skip this is PWALTDIR() is set -- 
although our version of pw doesn't set this at all.  There also appears to
be a shortage of command line options that could be used to enable this
behaviour.

Regards,
--
Matt Emmerton