/etc/mailname and cron

[Derek Broughton]

tony B wrote:

> The mail that gets sent from me to them is generated when the monthly
> cron job ran and produced some output.  Cron generated that mail, and
> evidently used the info in /etc/mailname to generate the address.
> Perhaps that file gets setup during install, and I responded
> inappropriately to something during installation?

Cron didn't generate any mail.  It basically pipes its output to mailx -
which requires an MTA.  So you _probably_ want to remove your MTA.
> 
> In any event, I'm out of my depth here, and I'm not sure (1) how I got
> my mail misconfigured and (2) what I need to do next.  As I said, I have
> minimal experience with mail other than using it.  I'm not opposed to
> spending the time learning more about mail, but I all I really wanted to
> do was setup my account to get mail.  Since no one else seems to be
> having this problem I have doubtless made an erroneous response
> somewhere along the line.

If you're running breezy or earlier, or upgraded from breezy, you probably
have postfix installed.  If you still want to be able to receive email from
cron, you can try "sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix" and make sure that you
tell it you want local mail delivery only (I'm pretty sure there's an
option in debconf for that) or, I believe there's a local-only MTA
available (though I can't seem to find it right now).

This would be one of the reasons that the developers decided that it was
_not_ a good idea to install an MTA by default :-)
-- 
derek