Stupid newbie question.deleting users

In unix, mailboxes are tied to login accounts. Sendmail does not manage its own accounts.

Sendmail does have mail aliases, which map an incoming name in a mail message to a unix login. One way to disable incoming mail for a particular user is to put in an alias for that user, sending his mail to /dev/null.

Deleting a login account varies by type of system, and requires administrator access (logging on as user "root"). Here are some examples:

In AIX, the "smit" utility allows deletion of users (and lots of other things)

In HP-UX the similar utility is called "sam".

On SunOS 5.6, accounts are handled with "admintool".

On Linux systems, "linuxconf" is used.

On some versions of SCO unix, it is "adminsh".

And then there is the brute-force way of manually deleting entries from all of the appropriate configuration files and manually deleting the user's files. A favorite of long-time real-admins-dont-use-gui's types, but not recommended for most systems.

If this is not enough information, post a comment telling us what the problem is, what you are trying to do about it, what type of system you are running (hardware and operating system) and whether or not you are the system administrator. The more info you provide, the better answer you are likely to get, since we do not have to make guesses about your environment.

Good luck.

to delete a user account in sendmail you must actually get rid of the user all together. In linux, the easiest way is by using the userdel -r command. Simple and straight to the point.

Good Luck!

Find the file:
/etc/passwd

You should see an entry like:
user:x:500:100:user:/home/user:/bin/bash

Could also be:
user:x:100:100:user:/home/user:/bin/sh

or something similar.

You can completly delete this entry to delete the user.

You can merely disable the account as follows:
user:x123:500:100:user:/home/user:/bin/bash
or similar.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

Mail inboxes sometimes hide in /var/spool/mail. Local mailbox folders tend to hide a subdirectory called mail in the user's home directory.

Before deleting the user, try this:
# find / -user user_name_here -print

...this should give you a list of files owned by the user. Their mailbox should be one of them.