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Tom
Asked: 2010-10-07 09:03:32 +0800 CST

How can I get the cron daemon to send me email when a job fails with an error?

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I have a few Ubuntu boxes that run various cron jobs daily. As far as I know, there is no postfix or sendmail installed. What's the easiest and/or best way to get cron to send me an email when one of its jobs fail with an error?

Thanks!

linux ubuntu email cron

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    cron notifies root by default, this is local user mail delivery only.

    If you want to send emails to [email protected], then install postfix (defaut conf with listen on localhost only) and modifies /etc/aliases to forward emails to root to [email protected]. Then run 

    postaliases /etc/aliases

    and you're all set

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  2. You need to configure MTA (postfix, sendmail or the debian standard: exim, etc.). It may be problematic though if you don't have public, static IP in business IP range as most other blocks are blacklisted because of spammers.

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  3. Check out https://cronitor.io -- it's a simple cron job monitoring tool that will alert you if your job doesn't run, or takes too long to run, or finishes too quickly.

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