jhx @jhx@bsd.cafe
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A fun little journey on where the "You have mail" message comes from when logging into a system. 😎 :freebsd: :openbsd:

Hope people enjoy the article - it is a little heavy on the programming side of things.

jhx7.de/blog/you-have-mail/

You Have Mail

If you’ve ever logged in to a FreeBSD system, you have certainly seen the line “you have mail”. No big deal might one say, it simply tells the user that there is mail to be read. Indeed, that is the case… but have you maybe wondered how that is possible? After all, it must come from somewhere, right?! Where to begin? First of all, there must be some code that generates that message. Given that the message is displayed after logging in to the system, the culprit must be login(1). This very program is what is spawned when you log onto your FreeBSD system - it also does the important job of authorizing the given user (Would be quite a mess if anyone could logon to the system after all - esp. without a password!)

jhx7.de · Yet Another SysAdmin

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