Cron jobs should send errors to the webmaster

[François Marier]

Currently, the various cron jobs send errors to the user they run as (sometimes a custom user, sometimes root).

We should make sure that these emails reach someone by setting the cron email address to be one that's monitored. For example, the one that's set in debconf (<email address hidden>).

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Apparently that's as simple as setting the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab.

[François Marier (fmarier)]

It works for crontab-like entries in /etc/cron.d/ but doesn't seem to work for scripts in directories like /etc/cron.hourly/.

[François Marier (fmarier)]

According to these:

  https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s2-autotasks-cron-configuring.html
  http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3724/etc-cron-daily-foo-send-email-to-a-particular-user-instead-of-root

it sounds like the best option is to convert the hourly script to be run from /etc/cron.d/.