Managing cron and similar E-Mails from headless systems

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 01:20:41PM +0000, Adam Funk wrote:
> On 2017-02-17, Chris Green wrote:
> 
> > I have several headless systems doing useful work around the place:-
> ...
> > Most of these have one or more cron jobs running periodic rsync
> > backups, copying data, etc.  If the cron job has an error then it
> > sends E-Mail to the owner of the job ('chris' in most cases, might be
> > root in a couple).
> >
> > It's (moderately) easy to set up an MTA and /etc/aliases so that the
> > messages are sent to my normal E-Mail.  However I can't come up with a
> > straightforward way of indicating where the messsage is *from*.
> ...
> > Can anyone suggest a neat way of handling this so that I know where
> > the errors are coming from?
> 
> The only way I've found to do this is to use Exim with the "rewrite"
> stanza with "Eh" options to change all the locally generated addresses
> to one suitable address.  (I'm sure other full-size MTAs have the same
> facility, but Exim is the only one I know.)
> 
> I looked into nullmailer, but AFAICT it doesn't have a way to
> configure From addresses.
> 
I actually installed postfix, basically because I'm familiar with it,
and with the right settings for 'my' host etc. it does what I need.

-- 
Chris Green