From time to time I have this message
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/root

its 11910 lines
What is it?
What should I do?
Here is an example:

Salamo 3alaikom,

For sure I am not an experienced linux administrator. AFAIK, those messages are mails sent by the system logger to the system administrator concerning the activities that occur on the system. If you look closely on your system logs you will notice that these messages are mostly sent on a daily basis again I think this behaviour could be changed. You can use such logs to change your hostname for example, errors that may occur within sendmail. You may use them to ban a user from accessing the system if the user is acting in a bizzare way,....etc. In short those messages are so helpful to the experienced system administrator.

Salam.

The /bin/mail program, which is used to send mail via shell scripts. Type mail to check your mail.

Maher

these mails are sent by a program called logwatch
you must have installed this program yourself (you realy should know what you installed on your system).

its not a bad idea to have such reports (but you sould customize it to send you the info you really need), but its a bad idea to send them to root, since a stupid mail client exploit would suddenly end up being a root exploit, you should never read mail as root (postfix refuses to send mail to root by default).

cheers,
Alaa

It came from redhat CDs, in the installation sellected one of the options I can't remeber " workstaion, server, ..." , I didnt configure it at all, and its a production workstation, and Im not concerned with secuirty here.

Salaam