Updated cron?

[Leroy Tennison]

Just a quick update for anyone facing a similar situation and finding this: Postfix does have a way to do this through a feature called "smtp generic maps" and it's easy:

Create /etc/postfix/generic with, or example: root@<contents of /etc/mailname>   <some valid email address> (one "mapping" per line)
Run postmap hash:generic
Add "smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/generic" to /etc/postfix/main.cf
Restart Postfix



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-----Original Message-----
From: Robie Basak <robie.basak at ubuntu.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2019 10:45 AM
To: Leroy Tennison <leroy at datavoiceint.com>
Cc: ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Updated cron?

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 02:04:14PM +0000, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> I don't know about a specification but, from "man 5 crontab" on 
> OpenSUSE 13.2 'If MAILFROM is defined (and non-empty), it is used as 
> the envelope sender address, otherwise, "root" is used.

Sounds like it is using "sendmail -f <MAILFROM>".

Thank you for bringing this up Leroy. I thought I'd share my thoughts on what we should be doing generally in Ubuntu, rather than in answer to your specific question:

I have no particular objection to tweaking cron, but:

 1) it does seem to me that if users find MAILFROM necessary, then they  would be better served by being advised to tweak their MTA  configuration rather than hoping for a similar feature in every email  sending app and configuring each app individually.

 2) perhaps it's better to leave cron as-is for legacy purposes, but  advise that users look at newer tools that don't have a backward  compatibility burden for additional functionality (eg. systemd timers).

If there is clearly a leading cron compatible replacement in wide use in the community then switching to that might make sense, but it would need someone to take the ongoing effort to make sure that we don't break any existing users currently happy with the current cron implementation.