Talk:1728: Cron Mail

I think the "MAILTO" variable in "/etc/crontab" is meant, so only only cron-mails would go to this address, not all mails for the user

Rincewind (talk) 13:09, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

The huge question is whether adding an email message to crontab would result in cron producing even more mail - or whether it would cause cron to fail in some way. The latter would do damage by killing some (possibly critical) cron tasks - the former could rapidly fill up the hard drive with an exponentially-growing crontab. An intermediate situation would be that cron simply ignores the junk and continues to function as before - in which case Cueball's change will have little practical impact on disk space consumption - but probably gradually slow cron's crontab parser to a crawl, which would also have rather severe effects. On most Linux setups, the mail directories are on a different partition to /etc. There is often very little spare space on the partition with /etc on it - so it's likely that Cueball's change will eventually do terrible damage in that case too. 162.158.69.98 14:42, 2 September 2016 (UTC)