Re: [gentoo-user] weird cron mail problem

[Willie Wong <wwong@princeton.edu>]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 01:22:28PM -0500, Philip Webb wrote:
> 090106 Willie Wong wrote:
> > this suggests that either cron or your mailer is misconfigured.
> > From the logs, you are running ssmtp. Check the config files for it
> > to see why mail intended for root@localhost
> > is delivered to root@ca.inter.net. 
> 
>  /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf  has the lines (the last refers to my ISP):
> 
>   ...
>   # The person who gets all mail for userids < 1000
>   # Make this empty to disable rewriting.
>   root=postmaster
>   ...
>   # The full hostname
>   hostname=ca.inter.net
>   ...
> 
> It looks as if this combination causes it to send to root@ca.inter.net .
> I can't find a man file for  ssmtp.conf , only for  ssmtp ,
> tho' the latter says the former should exist,
> so I can't check in any more detail just how the lines above work,
> eg what "rewriting" refers to or how the hostname is used.
> 

Okay, I am now a bit confused. What is "ca.inter.net"? A whois shows
no match. Does it refer to your ISP? or to your personal box? 

In any case, you may want to change the root line to 
"root=purslow" so the mail gets sent to purslow instead of postmaster
(which according to /etc/mail/aliases becomes root again). 

Also, just a personal preference: but on systems that are on for long
enough of periods to have daemon process that will be emailing stuff
to sys admins (processes like cron and such), I'd usually install an
actual MTA instead of something like ssmtp. 

W
-- 
Willie W. Wong                                      wwong@math.princeton.edu
408 Fine Hall,  Department of Mathematics,  Princeton University,  Princeton
A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.