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Lately I’ve been opening terminal and getting this message:
“You have mail.”

Huh? Mail.app doesn’t show any mail, and OS X doesn’t come with pine, so how the heck to I check this?

I found the answer here:
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_read_system_mail_on_my_mac_os_x_system.html

You can type ‘mailx’ in terminal to read your mail. It lists your messages and you can type the message number to read it.

Like I thought, I was getting bouncebacks from my PHP mail function, because I’m running a PHP development environment (MAMP) and was testing php’s mail function, and then denying the outgoing smtp connections with lil’ snitch. I knew that the messages were there but I just didn’t know how to check them! Cron can also email you errors, so this is useful info to have.

On another note, it’s hard to see everything that’s going on in your system. I realized yesterday that someone could SSH, FTP, windows file share, run PHP scripts, timbuktu exchange, have mail, and get web content from my macintosh without me ever knowing. It would be nice to have some kind of utility to watch all of the sharing activity on my machine. I remember windows’ ’sharewatcch’ for XP that would allow me to watch file sharing on my PC. Sure, I could stare at my logs, but I should do more research on monitoring this activity live.

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