[kde-linux] Cron emails don't respect my MAILTO

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

On Tuesday 11 May 2010 12:38:53 Anne Wilson wrote:
> I set up a small rsync job to backup my kaddressbook contacts, using
> SystemSettings.  I set a mailto, to direct the messages to my external
> address, so that they would always  be on my mail server.  They are being
>  sent to my laptop local mailbox (/var/spool/mail/anne).
> 
> I've used 'crontab -e' to check the job settings - the mailto looks
>  correct.

It's MAILTO (all caps).  Lowercase won't work.

>  I've tried both with and without spaces around the "=" - can
>  someone tell me which is correct?.

Either.  Any number of spaces adjacent to the '=' are dropped.  "MAILTO       
=  foo" as a line does the same thing as "MAILTO=foo".

>  /etc/aliases is set to send root mail
>  to me, at my external address - but the job in question is running as
>  anne, not as root, so that shouldn't matter.

Maybe.  Depending on the cron daemon, it may be delivering the mail itself 
instead of using your local MTA, I guess.  The documentation I'm looking at 
refers the the value of MAILTO as the "user" the report goes to, not the 
address -- so your cron daemon may be expecting a local user that it can 
deliver to directly.

I really don't think this is the issue though.  Do your MTA/MDA logs indicate 
the mail was received from cron and delivered?

> I've completely run out of ideas for checking.  What else could be causing
>  the mailto to be ignored?

Please send output of (crontab -l | grep -Ev '^[[:space:]]*(#|$)'), feel free 
to drop any command lines, I just want to double-check your syntax on the 
environment setting lines.

It would be helpful to know what cron daemon you are using.  Ancient ones 
didn't support setting environment variables at all.  Perhaps there's a 
minimalist one out there that also doesn't support it and you somehow got that 
instead of a normal, full-featured one.  On Debian there's only one package 
that provides the "cron-daemon" virtual package, so this is also unlikely.
-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.           	 ,= ,-_-. =.
bss at iguanasuicide.net            	((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy 	 `-'(. .)`-'
http://iguanasuicide.net/        	     \_/
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