mail command returns fseek Invalid argument, panic temporary file seek

Today I logged into one of our older servers, haven't logged into it for a while and saw that there was new mail (as always given the number of cron jobs running).

Below is the output of my command.

[root@server /]# mail 

"/var/spool/mail/root": 1832 messages 1777 new 1832 unread 

fseek: Invalid argument 

panic: temporary file seek

After a little bit of searching online I found two possible and simple solutions.

If you want to read the mail try using mutt instead of mail. It doesn't have a problem with the 2GB file size of the mail box that mail did.

If you don't care about the old stuff you can run:

rm -f /var/spool/mail/root

to remove the file and then

cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/root

to recreate a blank file.  

I ended up reading the mail I wanted and then blowing the file away.  But before I could recreate it there was already a new file with 62MB of mail in it.