Completely disable mail.send

TrueNAS General
1

I’m running 25.10-3.1 on a FreeNAS-Mini-3.0-XL+ (it was running 11.2 until about a month ago!)

It’s on my home lan, which is not connected to the internet or anything like that. I never provided it an email address, however it seems like every time the system sneezes, it tries to send an email out…and that job fails because I never set up email. I can’t see actual failed jobs for all of the mail.send failure messages that show up on the jobs list.

Is there any way to tell the system “DO NOT TRY to send an E-mail”? Since it doesn’t seem to be smart enough to realize there’s no address provided to send email to.

2

Just disable the E-mail alert service. Go to System→Alert Settings. Click the 3 dots next to the E-mail alert service, and uncheck the Enabled box.

3

Thanks for a quick response, but…

it’s already not enabled, yet I have several mail.send “stopped” messages in Running Jobs. “[EFAULT] You must provide an outgoing mailserver and mail server port when sending mail”

Something is trying to send mail when cron jobs, etc., finish.

4

OK, this is kind of brute-force, but you can delete all the pending mail in /var/mail and then bind mount /dev/null to /var/mail. This will overlay /dev/null on top of /var/mail and discard any pending mail immediately.

5

This sort-of worked.

I’m at least not seeing mail.send failures in the jobs dropdown (though maybe I will, given more time).

Now instead outputs from commands in the shell often display “zsh: not a directory: /var/mail/root” in addition to what I’d normally expect. (e.g., zpool list writes its output, then that message is printed.)

6

Hmm. Try removing the bind mount, and making a new bind mount of /dev/null to /var/mail/root to get rid of the cosmetic error.

If this works, you can create an init/shutdown script entry to create the bind mount on every boot.