purging old mail

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 09:45:49AM +0200, 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?
> If so - how?

You could either create a routine to rotate the file - maybe syslogd 
could do it.  Or, set up an alias to forward the email messages
to another place.  These would be log and security messages.  You 
could forward them to /bin/null, but I think it is bad form to
automatically nuke security messages.

Note also that /var/log will grow over time.  The usual solution
is to use the syslog utility to manage those files so they roll
over at appropriate times and old ones eventually get removed
at some interval you set.

////jerry

> 
> Mats Lindberg
>