I have mail?

[Red Lotus]

When I log in as root or use the finger command on root, it says that root has mail. Now, where can I find this mail? How could someone have mailed me if I haven't given any linux email address to anyone? And how do I reply to this mail?

Sorry, but I've only used AOL mail before, so I have no real experience with mailing. ;)

[posterboy]

Linux has a habit of emailing "things" to root. This is likely what the mail is. Now, you need a mail client. Maybe Pine? OR you can just type mail, and read it in a very primative way. There's Mutt, also, and then lots of them for the x-windows environs. As a fine point, root, shouldn't really be getting mail, but should be aliased to the user that you run under. That's maybe best left for now, as an exercise for later.
Ray

[xh3g]

posterboy's advice is good. i only want to help with a short explanation of what that mail *is*..

Unix, being a user-based system, offers local mail among it's users, usually found in /var/spool/mail/username. it is the same underlying system that email (as we normally think of it) uses, but can be utilized by users and applications to send messages to users on that system for later retrieval. that is what's happening to you, an application or log daemon is sending root mesages about the system's status. the mail never gets sent out of your system and onto the internet, just to root's mailbox in /var/spool/mail/root (location of the mailbox varies on different systems and linux distrobutions).

hope i was able to explain it a bit. learning the concept of 'local mail' was a bit foreign to me when i migrated from windows to linux :)