Turning off New Mail Notification

KingofBLASH · 04-02-2004, 04:19 PM

I'm running Slackware 9.1, and whenever I receive mail in my local spool, all console sessions notify me with an excerpt of the emails. The problem is, that with all of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to, it is very painful to work on the command line and have fetchmail running as a cron job.

Is it possible to turn off the new mail notification, or perhaps only have it print a simple message like:

There are x unread messages

Thank you,

Dan

trickykid · 04-02-2004, 04:26 PM

Edit your /etc/profile and comment out the portion to notify users of new mail.

bnice · 04-02-2004, 04:29 PM

from /etc/profile:

Code:

# Notify user of incoming mail.  This can be overridden in the user's
# local startup file (~/.bash.login or whatever, depending on the shell)
if [ -x /usr/bin/biff ]; then
 biff y
fi

couple of options:[list=1][*]Change `y` to `n`[*]make /usr/bin/biff non-executable[*]comment out this section.[/list=1]

HTH

fsbooks · 04-24-2004, 12:28 AM

BTW, the origins of the biff command is one of my favourite:

From http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/fa...section-3.html

biff : This command, which turns on asynchronous mail notification,
was actually named after a dog at Berkeley.

I can confirm the origin of biff, if you're interested.
Biff was Heidi Stettner's dog, back when Heidi (and I, and
Bill Joy) were all grad students at U.C. Berkeley and the
early versions of BSD were being developed. Biff was
popular among the residents of Evans Hall, and was known
for barking at the mailman, hence the name of the command.

Confirmation courtesy of Eric Cooper, Carnegie Mellon University

orange400 · 04-24-2004, 02:07 AM

lol ... nice origin ...

Linux.tar.gz · 03-10-2012, 03:38 PM

Nowadays (Slackware 13.37), it doesn't work anymore.
I commented all biff lines in /etc/profile, and every login of every user still have the mail notification.

trickykid · 03-13-2012, 06:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Linux.tar.gz

Nowadays (Slackware 13.37), it doesn't work anymore.
I commented all biff lines in /etc/profile, and every login of every user still have the mail notification.

If it's not a mail server and you don't need it to send mail, just disable the MTA from running then. New mail notifications is awesome though, it lets you know when you have mail waiting.