On Wednesday 12 Oct 2011 16:06:03 Walter Dnes wrote:

>   My most embarressing incident involving linux was one day when I added
> a cron job, and it started sending log messages to "root".  Back then, I
> didn't know that ssmtp made a "sendmail" link, let alone 3 of them.
> ssmtp did its thing, and pushed the messages for "root" to my ISP's MTA,
> which forwarded them to my ISP's root inbox.  "They were not amused".

I have 3 boxen which would not send anything via ssmtp with default settings.  
All they did was to fill in a /root/dead.letter file with relevant messages 
instead.

>   After a few attempts, I finished the game of whack-a-mole and killed
> all the symlinks, and made sure that it would never happen again.  I
> addition to configuring ssmtp.conf to send "root" messages to myself, I
> also made the above directories to prevent symlinks being constructed.
> Who knows what other programs send mail on a whim.

Many.  Some you have to set up to do so, others when run via cron will email 
the results (e.g. rkhunter, logrotate, et al).

In any case, I had to set up ssmtp to use my gmail account to relay messages 
before it emailed anything at all.

>   This is the first time I've had this interactive prompt happen with
> procmail.  What gives?

Not sure, some one who has procmail set up ought to be able to help here I 
hope.
-- 
Regards,
Mick