How do I delete all Terminal mail?

Question

I set up a cronjob a long time ago that now doesn't exist. Whenever I open up Terminal, it now says "You have mail". I have something like 100 messages that all say the same thing. How do I mass delete all of the messages?

Answer 1

Launch the Terminal mail app with:

$ mail

You'll see a list of all your messages. Look at the count at the top, it will say the number of messages you have. Say that number is 30. From the mail prompt, do

? delete 1-30
? q

And that should be it. Make sure do to the q after the delete 1-* command, that saves the changes to disk.

Answer 2

You may also go the direct route and just run : > /var/mail/$USER to empty the mail file.

PS: Deleting the mail file requires sudo, just setting it to empty is enough.