dead.letter is the dead letter queue for in-system email.
Looks like the output of a cron job being mailed to a user that cannot accept delivery (probably because the you don't have a delivery agent or root has a bad .mailrc or .forward).
Note that most of the messages in the file are from /etc/cron.daily/msec


On 07/18/2012 03:03 PM, joe@actionline.com wrote:
> 
> Help!
> 
> Today, I discovered the following file in my system's top '/' directory:
> 
> -rw-------   1 root  3428016 Mar 06 04:06 dead.letter
> 
> This file contains 71,756 lines and 3,428,016 chars with dated entries
> every day between June 10, 2010 and March 6, 2012.  Some days have only
> one date entry. Some have 2, 3, or 4 date entries with the same date.
> 
> It seems that mostly the same information is duplicated many, many times,
> including two long lists of photo files in two directories repeated many
> times.
> 
> View an excerpted copy of the first 300 and last 300 lines of this file here:
> 
> - - - http://www.upquick.com/temp/dead.txt - - -
> 
> - Can anyone please tell me why this file was created?
> 
> - Is there some action that I need to take as a result of information
> that is revealed in this file?
> 
> - Is there any reason to save this file?  Or can it be safely deleted?
> 
> Thanks friends,
> 
> Joe
> 
> 
> 
> 
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