can one of you unix gurus tell me how to forward email on my Redhat 7.2 linux server "root" account to another account that I can check through SMTP.

Also, I had some dns issues and my root account got about 1700 emails quickly over it. Is there a way to mass delete all those?

There should be a file called /etc/mail/aliases or /etc/aliases which contains the system aliases. Create one for root, like the other ones.

Then type newaliases to rebuild the database/

You could delete all the root e-mail by doing

rm /var/spool/mail/root