Root mail with Kmail

[Chris Ruprecht]

... and to read the currently available root mail, disable mail for a
moment (service sendmail stop), then add the current root mail to the
user's folder (replace "mailusername" with the name of the user who
should receive root's mail

cat /var/spool/mail/root >> /var/spool/mail/mailusername

now re-enable mail (service sendmail start)

You should do the disable/enable mail bit, because you don't want
sendmail to write to the mail file you're busy messing with. The result
might not be pretty :).

You can now read the messages which are already in the root mailbox.
Once you have verified that you can indeed see all the messages, you can
delete the actual root messages:

log in as root (su -)
then type:
mail
once in mail, it'll give you a list of messages, to delete all, type:
d *
q

/var/spool/mail/root should now be 0 bytes long and no longer grow since
root's mail is now redirected elsewhere.

Best regards,
Chris


On Sat, 2004-09-11 at 14:39, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Sa, den 11.09.2004 schrieb J.L. Coenders um 20:31:
> 
> > I want to read my local root mailbox with KMail. How do I do this?
> > I guess chowning the mailbox to a common 'rootmail' group would be a trick, 
> > but I wonder if that is safe.
> > 
> > - Jeroen
> 
> Don't do what you have in mind!
> 
> Edit /etc/aliases, change at bottom the prepared alias for root to setup
> an alias for root to a normal user account. Run "newaliases" and you'll
> instantly get new root's mail to that normal user account, readable with
> any client.
> 
> This is said for running Sendmail. If you have Postfix you'll have to
> edit /etc/postfix/aliases and after that to run "/usr/sbin/postalias
> /etc/postfix/aliases".
> 
> Alexander
>