Bug 192452

Summary:	sys-process/vixie-cron - Add mail from capability
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Heath Caldwell (RETIRED) <hncaldwell>
Component:	[OLD] Core system	Assignee:	No maintainer - Look at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proxy_Maintainers if you want to take care of it <maintainer-needed>
Status:	RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	cron-bugs+disabled, leho, pacho, tom, treecleaner, wolf31o2
Priority:	High	Keywords:	PMASKED
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Deadline:	2019-10-11
Attachments:	Patch to implement MAILFROM feature

Description Heath Caldwell (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2007-09-13 19:47:15 UTC

At our installation, mail with a from address that claims to be from our domain is dropped if the user is not known.  Local service accounts (which don't count as real users in this context) run cron jobs, with their mails being dropped because of this policy.

We would like to be able to tell cron to use a different from address in the envelope in much the same way that you can tell it to use a different recipient using the MAILTO variable.  I propose using a MAILFROM variable for this.

I think this feature would be useful for others as well as for our situation.

I can write the patch, I just wanted to check to see if you would consider including and distributing it before I went through the trouble.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1 Paul B. Henson 2007-09-13 20:00:31 UTC

Just to clarify, the current command cron uses to send mail is:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -FCronDaemon -odi -oem -oi -t

The proposed enhancement would allow specifying the envelope from address (not the header from address, which is already root), and basically result in cron running:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -FCronDaemon -odi -oem -oi -t -f$MAILFROM


It's pretty trivial, but we don't want to maintain a custom cron ebuild so if you're not interesting in adding it in portage we'll probably use a postfix rewriting map instead. This seems cleaner though.

Another possibility would be to just hardcode -froot, considering that the header From is already root anyway, then they would just match. Currently the envelope from is the user whose job is running.

Comment 2 Thilo Bangert (RETIRED) (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2008-10-08 14:19:10 UTC

IMHO opinion this is good feature to have. feel free to attach a patch. whether we can include it largely depends on the patch - so no promises yet...

Comment 3 Heath Caldwell (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2008-10-08 18:22:05 UTC

Created attachment 167640 [details, diff]
Patch to implement MAILFROM feature

Comment 4 Tom Hendrikx 2009-02-25 20:55:24 UTC

Any news on whether this patch will be included?

Comment 5 Thilo Bangert (RETIRED) (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2009-05-14 16:51:21 UTC

cronie - a fork of vixie-cron - has this change in its vcs.
http://git.fedoraproject.org/git/?p=cronie.git;a=commit;h=48f16e2f14e3f22e5036c99c306e1262430f8bb6

Comment 6 Leho Kraav (:macmaN @lkraav) 2018-11-22 12:34:22 UTC

https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/issues/17 also added MAILFROM support for anacron in cronie-1.5.2, so I'd just recommend migrating.

Comment 7 Michał Górny archtester

2019-10-11 15:07:55 UTC

Package removed.