When I have a terminal open, linux often notifies me of new system mail. How can I turn this notification off?

Here is the the reason I need to do this...

There's a command I run that streams audio. Once the command is running, it continues to update stats on the commandline.

Whenever I get a system notification of new mail, my audio stream is interrupted, and I have to re-run the command to resume streaming.

So a solution is to disable mail notification, or if there's a better way of dealing with my problem, I'd appreciate knowing it.

BTW, I can't put the streaming command in the background with &

Thx.

If you're shell is bash you should unset the MAILCHECK variable. You could add this line:
to your .bashrc file for this purpose.

To verify that this is cause of the notification, first check your shell is indeed bash:
(it should say /bin/bash)
And then just verify the MAILCHECK variable is indeed set:
To read more, open the bash manual page:
and search (press /) for MAILCHECK (use uppercase).

Thanks for the full response.

Yes,

echo $SHELL

does say /bin/bash