Are you still trying to get rid of the "You have mail" message? I had some trouble with it at first, so this is what I did.

1) Check my mail with pine. You already did that, so...
2) Look in /var/mail. Delete the files in there.

I'm not the sharpest, but I think that your mailbox can be either ~/mail or /var/mail , depending on how you set things up. Anyway, try that out. Note, you may want to make sure you back up any messages that you want to save, in case this breaks something.

Thanks for the tip, but putting those commands in .bashrc did not help.

It will not help on its own but, if you add on ~/.bash_profile :
source ~/.bashrc

It will do (assuming you set unset MAILCHECK in .bashrc )

Nothing happened!

1. I changed the biff y to biff n in /etc/profile but still see the mail notification
2. I chmod -x biff and still getting the notification

LOL This one is going to be fun.

Ok, it no longer says 'You have mail'. Now it says 'No mail'. I used shilo's tip. I also followed the .bash_profile and .bashrc tip, but it still displays the message 'No mail'. It's fine with just that message, though. Before it was just annoying me because there was no messages in there. However, if you do a less ~/mail/saved-messages, there is an actual message that the system creates. I don't know why that is. That same message was in /var/mail but under the name root.

Wow, that was fun! Thanks guys.

Just one question, I am curious, do you use /bin/bash as login shell or /bin/csh ?

/bin/sh which is a symlink to /bin/bash and that's the default shell configuration. I have not changed my default shell. Why?

weird...

man bash says :
MAIL If this parameter is set to a file name and the MAILPATH
variable is not set, bash informs the user of the arrival
of mail in the specified file.

So if you unset MAIL, logically you should not get mail signals...

You don't want it to say anything? As it is now, when you have new mail, it will tell you, when you have no mail, it will tell you. I always found that handy.

To turn off biff try this

In your .bash_profile and .bashrc place a line that says "biff n" which turns biff off. You can also do "export MAILCHECK="no"" to turn off mail notification.

biff is responsible for email reminders.