this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 29 points 2 days ago (2 children)

When I was young and installed my first Linux, I actually searched around as root if this was stored anywhere. But I never found it.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

https://askubuntu.com/q/641049

TL;DR: it's supposed to send email to an administrator, but by default on some distros (including Ubuntu), it isn't actually sent anywhere.

[–] mat@linux.community 16 points 2 days ago

omg I totally accidentally enabled this

I'd bother removing it but it's kinda funny to get an email reprimanding me when I ctrl+c out of a sudo command I mistyped, and maybe it will serve as a warning if it gets compromised :p

[–] Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago

I thought it's just a joke because I only had it on local PCs. Imagine my reaction when I actually got an email by an admin when using sudo on a network...

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 13 points 2 days ago

Distro-agnostic: /var/spool/mail or /var/mail; but both directories are empty on my system, and untouched since installation.

I'm sure one could make the incident report go there by installing one or two softwares. Would actually be interesting to see what it reads, since this message has caused many Linux newbs anguish.