Email alerts from cron jobs

Normally (Centos 7), /etc/crontab contains an entry:

MAILTO=root

Furthermore, we assume that the mail utitity has been installed (yum package mailx).

For email alerts to work, we need a local email setup and a forwarding rule from root@localhost to the target address.

If a mail agent (e.g. postfix) is up and running, we can define an alias in /etc/aliases

root: [email protected]

and compile aliases.db via the newaliases command.

Then we can check our setup with

mail -s "Test alert" root < /dev/null