My desktop Macintosh is drowning in email as I type this, and the situation is most interesting. I’ve been running Mac OS X 10.2 for quite a while, as you would expect, and have experimented with different cron jobs, shell scripts, and much more. But while I’ve explored a lot, it was only this evening that I launched sendmail on my G4 for the first time. Well… not good!

There are thousands upon thousands of email messages from the system now flooding into my mailbox. Thousands. It’s rather amazing. But what’s puzzling is where they’re coming from. If I look in /var/spool/mail there are 4-5 messages queued. They get delivered and fifty new messages replace them. I delete those and another twenty take their place. But these messages are from months ago, so they must be somewhere.

Here’s a typical message. Check out the Received: lines closely:

Return-Path: <taylor@thebox.local>

Received: from thebox.local (localhost [127.0.0.1])
by thebox.local (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h8J5Xcd9019108
for <taylor>; Thu, 18 Sep 2003 23:33:51 -0600 (MDT)
Received: by thebox.local (8.12.9/8.12.2/Submit) id h51GK1MN002023;
Sun, 1 Jun 2003 10:20:01 -0600 (MDT)
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2003 10:20:01 -0600 (MDT)
Message-Id: 200306011620.h51GK1MN002023@thebox.local
From: taylor@thebox.local (Cron Daemon)
Subject: Cron <taylor@TheBox> sh /Users/taylor/087-getstats.sh

Since I can’t seem to do much about it, I am going to just wait it out. And meanwhile…

$ ls -l /var/mail/taylor
total 21936
-rw------- 1 taylor mail 11227715 Sep 18 23:42 taylor

and growing! 🙂