Q. I'd like to send email to user@example.com instead of default root user. How do I change email settings under crontab file?
A. A crontab file contains instructions to the cron daemon.
An active line in a crontab will be either an environment setting or a cron command. An environment setting is of the form:
name = value
where the spaces around the equal-sign (=) are optional, and any subsequent non-leading spaces in value will be part of the value assigned to name. The value string may be placed in quotes (single or double, but matching) to preserve leading or trailing blanks. The value string is not parsed for environmental substitutions, thus lines like
PATH = $HOME/bin:$PATH
will not work as you might expect.
MAILTO Variable
In addition to LOGNAME, HOME, and SHELL, cron will look at MAILTO if it has any reason to send mail as a result of running commands in "this" crontab. If MAILTO is defined (and non-empty), mail is sent to the user so named. First open your crontab file:
# vi /etc/crontab
OR
$ crontab -e
To send email to vivek@nixcraft.in, enter:
MAILTO=vivek@nixcraft.in
If MAILTO is defined but empty (MAILTO=""), no mail will be sent.
MAILTO=""
Otherwise mail is sent to the owner of the crontab.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks, never even thought it could be changed, I always used my .forward for this. Very handy.
I too have always the “.forward” option. This is done by the follwing…..
create a new file called .forward
vi /root/.forward
Enter the email address on the first line in the file.
youremail@address.com
Save (w) the file and exit (q)
:wq
Now, anytime the ‘root’ user get an email, it will automatically be forwarded to the address you specified in the .forward file.
You can also place the .forward file in users home directories /home/user1/.forward
Thanks for the info up above though, I’ll have to check that out.
Hi All,
Please help me out..
I configured cron job under FTPPKR user.i’ll get mails from FTPPKR@xyz.com whenever cron runs..But whenever i need the mails to be delivered from GTPPKR@xyz.com user.
Is it possibe? If yes, please help me out..
Yes, that’s entirely possible. Just figure out if the emails are being sent with sendmail or postfix, then adjust their settings to reflect that. You could deploy address rewrites to achieve this, for example.
SOLARIS does not support the MAILTO feature. Instead one needs to append the crontab entry with | mailto user@domain
Ex:
00 12 * * * run_command.sh | mail user@domain
Mail addressed to ‘root’ is often redirected to some other account using /etc/aliases. You might like to edit (or add) the line beginning with ‘root:’ to point to some other account.
But, How if I dont want to receive notification from crontab? How to set it ? Because I’m monitoring mail server, and notification from crontab unnecessary for me.
@alex: add >/dev/null 2>&1 to the end of your line(s) in crontab. This will redirect all crontab output to /dev/null
What command is cron using to send email? I’m trying to get cron working with esmtp, but no luck so far.