Sugestions - System E-mail

[David Tonhofer, m-plify S.A.]

--On Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:41 AM -0700 redhat at buglecreek.com wrote:

> We have a large amount of redhat servers (50+).  They all run various
> cronjobs as root and other users that have accounts on the machines.
> The scripts and cronjobs generate output which is mailed to the local
> user on the machine.  Standard cron stuff.  My issue is that these
> system mails unfortunately rarely get read by anyone.  As a result the
> files in /var/spool/mail on the servers continue to grow.  In the past
> people used to just turn off sendmail, but they did not realize that
> /var/spool/clientmqueue/ just fills up with all the undeliverable mail.
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how to handle these system mails on
> a large amount of servers?  I guess if you really don't care about the
> mails, you could link to /dev/null.  But that seems a little drastic.

The first step would be to centralize the whole mail infrastructure.
Select one server that will be the SMTP mail hub and mailbox repository,
and will have a POP3 or IMAP or webmail interface.

Then configure sendmail (or better, postfix) on all of your machines
to forward mails to that hub.

Define mailboxes for all the human users. Define group e-mail addresses that forward
to these mailboxes (.e.g "techies" will forward to "joe", "james" and "priscilla")
Now system mail can be forwarded to these group addresses and all the users will see it.

Finally, stem the flood at the source: suppress all mail that is not
indicative of a problem (otherwise, no-one will read it anyway) by
suitably wrapping your cronjobs into some filter scripts.

There are certainly applications out there that can take over a good
part of the above job, but haven't looked in that direction yet.

Best,

-- David