Curiosity re: /var/spool/mail by beginner??

[Tim]

On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 18:33 -0400, William Case wrote:
> This is just a curiosity question?

Is it?  ;-)

> I have been using Linux (FCC) for over two years now, and I have never
> found a use for /var/spool/mail.  Whenever I login as root I get
> messages telling me that I have mail. I just clean it out every 5 or 6
> months.  I read through it first using the mail utility but there
> never seems to be any information that is useful to me.

That might depend on your system and what you do with it.  You can get
warnings about getting close to running out of hard drive space, alerts
about other hard drive errors (including it's going to die soon sort of
warnings), records of recent updates, alerts about failed log-on
attempts, etc.

I check on mine daily, it saves me from having to check for filling up
drives too much by hand, and I'd rather see a warning about imminent
hard drive failures than just discover the system was unusable one day.

-- 
(Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.)

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