# "you have mail" change in FreeBSD 11



## tingo (Nov 14, 2016)

This isn't a very important thing, but I haven't seen it mentioned yet, so here goes.
Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed that the "you have mail" notification in the shell (/bin/sh in this case) has changed in FreeBSD 11. It used to be (in all earlier releases) that you could get back to a shell which had been inactive for some minutes (ten?) and press enter, and the shell would say "you have mail" if you pressed enter (if the user has mail, of course).

Well, in FreeBSD 11, it is not enough to press enter - you will have to enter a command (like `ls` or something), if you simply press enter you only get a new line.
I only have upgrade two machines to FreeBSD 11.0-stable yet, but both shows this behavior.
Machine one

```
root@kg-v7# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-v7.kg4.no 11.0-STABLE FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE #0 r307729: Fri Oct 21 22:34:13 CEST 2016
     root@kg-v7.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
```
machine two

```
root@kg-u35jc# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-u35jc.kg4.no 11.0-STABLE FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE #0 r307748: Sun Oct 23 19:17:49 CEST 2016
     root@kg-u35jc.kg4.no:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
```
Has anybody else seen this?


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## tingo (Nov 18, 2016)

The MAIL variable is correctly set, too:

```
root@kg-v7# echo $MAIL
/var/mail/root
```
Not sure what is going on here.


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 18, 2016)

I also notice that, when I have two terminals open, if I read my mail in one, the second will still report that I have mail until I do something in that terminal.


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