Hi,

I'm running a Fedora 15 machine, and I rebooted it a couple of days back for the first time in two years.

However, after I'd rebooted, my Gmail account was flooded with cron messages (cron had been set up with MAILTO my Gmail account). I guess I'd never really noticed that I'd not received these cron messages before, since most of them are junk anyway.

Anyway, I removed the MAILTO line, so that at least new messages are not sent to my Gmail account (Google gets annoyed and limits one's account if it exceeds so many sends or receives in a given period), but I still have a problem with the older messages.

My problem is that I can't even find where these old cron messages are being stored; I figured that they would either be visible with $ mail -u root, or $mail -u username, or simply $mail. I did discover a bunch of messages, and so I deleted all of those, but they still kept arriving in my Gmail account. I can see from the dates on the messages received that some go all the way back to 2013.

Well, so that Gmail didn't limit my account again, I reluctantly disconnected the machine from the network, while I tried to figure it out, making sure that every message I could find in any mail account was deleted. I then reconnected the machine again this morning, but within a few minutes my Gmail account starts to get flooded with old cron messages again. So, I've again disconnected the machine for the moment.

I simply can't figure out where these cron messages are stored; all I basically want to do is to nuke the entire lot of them ... wherever they are!

Any assistance appreciated!

Thanks!

You could change MAILTO to send the messages to a non-existant email address.

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Steve Stites

Of course, but that doesn't take care of the tens of thousands of messages which already exist ... somewhere ... and which I cannot locate.

As I said, I figured I'd be able to find them in the relevant mail accounts, but they're not there.

Only three accounts exist in /var/mail, which are root, rpc, and my username, and all of which are empty, yet these ancient cron messages are still flooding into my Gmail account.