MacOS – Where does the mail utility store read mail

emailmacos

I have a few cron jobs that mail their output to my username. I check this mail in the terminal by typing mail. When I quit the mail program with 'q' it says "Saved X messages in mbox" (where X is the number of messages I just read).

How can I read those messages again?

Best Answer

If you wanted a full featured editor / mail client from the command line:

brew install mutt

If you just want to see the mail you can use the from command to see headers or look at the files in /var/mail/${USER}. Depending on how you disposed of messages, they also might be in your ~/mbox file

Some good reading at:

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MacOS – Cron configuration on Mavericks

This should be working and is certainly working on my Mavericks box.

If you don't have a "MAILTO" line in the crontab then output should get sent to the owner of the crontab.

Are you sure the job actually outputs something? Have you tried putting a job in the crontab that will be sure to have some output such as

*/10 * * * * *  /bin/echo "Working fine"

Are you sure you don't have a .forward file in the user home directory?

Have you tried using sendmail to send some mail to the account and see if it gets through.

MacOS – Cron job keeps running, not in any crontabs

You may want to check the following location, as this is where OS X stores crontabs:

/usr/lib/cron/tabs/

There may be a crontab which is stored there which is running your job. This is a directory that needs root privileges to access, so you may need to drop into a root shell using the sudo -s command before you'll be able to go into this directory.

Best Answer

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MacOS – Cron configuration on Mavericks

MacOS – Cron job keeps running, not in any crontabs

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