Why does terminal say: “You have mail”?

Question

Any idea why my Mac terminal says:

You have mail in /var/mail/lofye

How can I make it stop saying that every time I open terminal?

Answer 1

Somehow you've had a script or something similar deliver mail to your account on your local machine which is stored in /var/mail/lofye

You can either remove the folder /var/mail/lofye which will remove the alert that you have mail (as it will alert you if that folder is present and/or has unread messages) or you can use mail to read the messages before deleting them.

Answer 2

I'm willing to bet it's because there are files in that folder.

Have you actually looked at the contents of the folder? If there is something in there, it will more than likely give you an idea of what caused it, and how to prevent it in the future.

From the terminal:

cd /var/mail/lofye
ls

If you don't have mail, you won't see the message (there's not even a folder for my username under mail on my mac).

Answer 3

type mail to view the mail. I believe d deletes it

Answer 4

If your running ClamAV for Mac this is a known issue. The system mails you after each update and scheduled scan.

Answer 5

I was able to just create a .hushlogin and I've a clean Terminal now.

$ touch .hushlogin