Debian: I "have mail" ?! What does that mean?
 

I typed in a XTerm in IceWM(knowing I don't have permissions):
And got:
#1 I can't access that folder with these permissions. Why would it place it in such a folder?! What is in this file?
#2 What part of the system is responsible for this/ where do I turn this off?
Any help appreciated.

Try typing 'mail', that should open up the mail programme and show you the message. And I know they send mail to root (if it's configured to do so) when you try to become root using the 'sudo' command but aren't authorised to do so. So perhaps it's just a notification that a user is doing something they don't have permission to do (ie. using the command you typed)

So there is this program called 'mail'? I see. Indeed it seems to be a system message. Also actually I did have permissions to access the file (I just thought ~ was the top directory XD ). Still, I'd rather disable this behaviour. The info says mails can be 'undeleted': I'd rather not have something silly like this bogging up my HD eventually.

If you think about it, you'll see there's nothing silly about it, it's just how you see it.

Different distros (and bsd) have their own reasons to send mail. Freebsd I know sends mail if you run an incorrect command in cron.

It's just to detail the error message. You can suppress this method, but I honestly don't remember how. I've never personally ran debian, so I don't know the specifics for it.

As a guess... since you got it through dpkg-configure, it might be in one of the apt-get or package configuration files. Do a grep in /etc/ for 'mail' or something and see what sends mails automatically and then simply comment them out.

Although there is always reasons for wanting the mail. You never know when dpkg might go nuts and you don't know why and the detail would be in the mail. My suggestion is just goto /var/mail/yourusername/ and just wipe it every so often. The mails are quite tiny in size.

Ok. Thanks for all the replies. Starts to sound a bit logical. However, as long as I haven't figured out how to disable it or whether I want to disable it, I won't mark this thread as [SOLVED] (Wouldn't even know how ;D )

You'll need to click the link that says "Mark this thread as solved" near the top of the page within the sentence:


Please Mark this thread as solved if you feel a solution has been provided.

You opened it so you get to decide when its solved.

The messages are probably originating from a program called sendmail, which is part of Linux (mail was built into Linux from the git-go).

You can disable sendmail from starting up, but it's better to let it do its thing and read the messages from time to time. They might notify you of something you need to know.

See man mail and man sendmail for more information.