"Greg A. Woods" wrote:

> [ On Tuesday, July 24, 2001 at 08:38:59 (-0700), Jeremy C. Reed wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: the daily/weekly/monthly scripts
> >
> > On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Sam Carleton wrote:
> >
> > > If so, how do YOU recommend I set the $MAILTO in the crontab file?
> >
> > NetBSD's crontab(5) has a lot of info about this. It may be different on
> > other operating systems that use different implementations of
> > cron. (NetBSD uses Vixie's Cron.)
>
> Even better: don't save mail for root in a system mailbox -- forward it
> to a real human user via an alias in /etc/aliases (er, /etc/mail/aliases).
>
> Since this is tech-security it's probably appropriate to point out that
> you should never ever read any e-mail with any mail reader running as root.

Well, what I have done is set the $MAILTO enviornment variable in
daily.conf/weekly.conf/monthly.conf to my normal email address
scarleton@miltonstreet.com.  When testing the script, my email address ends up
in the To: field so I do believe that all will work find tonight.  This account
is on a different machine, but the firewall is able to send mail to it.

Sam

P.S.  I did not know that it was a bad thing for root to use a mail program.
Is that because of virus?  Or something else?