How to set email address for cron?

[Sebastian Stein]

Cron is generating some messages on my Ubuntu system. However, the messages are
always mailed to root@domain. I have set domain in my postfix configuration. Is
there a way to tell cron where to send the messages instead?

Sebastian

[Jeffery Michael Thompson]

This is quoting Seth Holmes from a previous thread in this newsgroup. "


You should allow yourself as a user of cron and run it as yourself. It will
e-mail alerts to the user account. If you want those alerts sent elsewhere,
you can set up an aliase in /etc/mail/aliases (or /etc/aliases depending on
your configuration). You could also set up the root account to do this with
by sending all root e-mail to you. But doing things as root when not
required as a "Bad Thing(tm)".

In addition, if you have a specific job you are running and you want the
output sent to a specific e-mail, you can pipe it through mailx and have it
sent to you.

0 7 * * * ls -laR / | mailx -s "Your directory tree" [email]address@domain.com[/email]

And for real simplification, you can use the MAILTO environment variable.

MAILTO=address@domain.com

This will mail on cron output to [email]address@domain.com[/email]. This goes in the
crontab file (which you edit with crontab -e).

This can all be found in the crontab man pages. Just some of it is in in
page 5 so you'd have to do

man 5 crontab

HTH
HAND

-- Seth H Holmes
"




Jeff Thompson

[Sebastian Stein]

Jeffery Michael Thompson <ninthwave@atspeakeasy.dotnetnospam> wrote:

> You should allow yourself as a user of cron and run it as yourself. It will
> e-mail alerts to the user account. If you want those alerts sent elsewhere,
> you can set up an aliase in /etc/mail/aliases (or /etc/aliases depending on
> your configuration).

Tried this. In /etc/aliases I have

root: admin@localhost

and admin is the account I'm working with.

> You could also set up the root account to do this with by sending all root
> e-mail to you. But doing things as root when not required as a "Bad
> Thing(tm)".

Yes, I didn't do this.

> In addition, if you have a specific job you are running and you want the
> output sent to a specific e-mail, you can pipe it through mailx and have it
> sent to you.
>
> 0 7 * * * ls -laR / | mailx -s "Your directory tree" [email]address@domain.com[/email]
>
> And for real simplification, you can use the MAILTO environment variable.
>
> MAILTO=address@domain.com

In /etc/cron.daily/aide I have:

MAILTO="${MAILTO:-admin@localhost}"

Still, it doesn't work.

Sebastian

[Seth H Holmes]

On 2006-02-10, Sebastian Stein <seb_stein@gmx.de> wrote:

>> MAILTO=address@domain.com

>
> In /etc/cron.daily/aide I have:
>
> MAILTO="${MAILTO:-admin@localhost}"
>
> Still, it doesn't work.

You have to add it to the crontab file.

crontab -e

That will allow you to edit the crontab file.

--
Seth H Holmes

[Sebastian Stein]

Seth H Holmes <sholmes@nottellingyouthiseither.com> wrote:

> On 2006-02-10, Sebastian Stein <seb_stein@gmx.de> wrote:
>

>>> MAILTO=address@domain.com

>>
>> In /etc/cron.daily/aide I have:
>>
>> MAILTO="${MAILTO:-admin@localhost}"
>>
>> Still, it doesn't work.

>
> You have to add it to the crontab file.
>
> crontab -e
>
> That will allow you to edit the crontab file.

It still doesn't work. It is really driving me crazy. Please also note that the
cron job for aide is started automatically by the system. The aide script is
put into /etc/cron.daily/. This time I added MAILTO=admin@localhost to
/etc/crontab. Still nothing changed.


Sebastian

[Seth H Holmes]

On 2006-02-14, Sebastian Stein <seb_stein@gmx.de> wrote:

> Seth H Holmes <sholmes@nottellingyouthiseither.com> wrote:

>> On 2006-02-10, Sebastian Stein <seb_stein@gmx.de> wrote:
>>

>>>> MAILTO=address@domain.com
>>>
>>> In /etc/cron.daily/aide I have:
>>>
>>> MAILTO="${MAILTO:-admin@localhost}"
>>>
>>> Still, it doesn't work.

>>
>> You have to add it to the crontab file.
>>
>> crontab -e
>>
>> That will allow you to edit the crontab file.

>
> It still doesn't work. It is really driving me crazy. Please also note that the
> cron job for aide is started automatically by the system. The aide script is
> put into /etc/cron.daily/. This time I added MAILTO=admin@localhost to
> /etc/crontab. Still nothing changed.

Where does mail for admin@localhost get delivered? Consider removing
@localhost.

--
Seth H Holmes

[Sebastian Stein]

Seth H Holmes <sholmes@nottellingyouthiseither.com> wrote:

>> It still doesn't work. It is really driving me crazy. Please also note that the
>> cron job for aide is started automatically by the system. The aide script is
>> put into /etc/cron.daily/. This time I added MAILTO=admin@localhost to
>> /etc/crontab. Still nothing changed.

>
> Where does mail for admin@localhost get delivered? Consider removing
> @localhost.

To the admin user's mailbox. For example, I'm as user admin send an email to
admin@localhost using mutt. Immediately after sending I receive this email in
my inbox. I already checked this several times.

Maybe I should contact the author of the aide Ubuntu package. How can I find
out who prepared the package?

Sebastian

[Unregistered]

Just figured it out!!! -- for me at least

the file /etc/mailname had a single entry (the machine name)
I have replaced that with my domain name (i.e. mydomain.com) - all is now working

I hope that info helps someone else out there