Managing cron and similar E-Mails from headless systems

[Adam Funk]

On 2017-02-23, Chris Green wrote:

> 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.

Yes, that's included in what I meant by "full-size MTAs".