Re: Using procmail to send cron output to local mailbox

On 01/21/2014 02:17 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> A little background:
>
> With Fedora 20, an MTA is no longer installed by default.  The 
> assumption is, only servers really need an MTA, and if a client system 
> needs one, the system owner is smart enough to figure out to install one.
>
> Well I use cron for various tasks on my notebook, and I am trying to 
> get local delivery to work without an MTA.  After days of going back 
> and forth on the Fedora user list, it has come down to procmail able 
> to deliver mail locally without an MTA.  So in /etc/sysconfig/crond I 
> have:
>
> # Settings for the CRON daemon.
> # CRONDARGS= :  any extra command-line startup arguments for crond
> CRONDARGS=-m "/usr/bin/procmail"
>
> and this works in terms of getting content into /var/spool/mail/rgm, 
> but the content is not a valid mailbox for mutt to process it.  Here 
> is the content of my mailbox.  Note no starting or ending blank line(s):
>
> From: "(Cron Daemon)" <rgm>
> To: rgm
> Subject: Cron <rgm@lx120e> rsync -tvz ftp.rfc-editor.org::rfcs/*.txt 
> /home/common/ietf/rfcs
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
> Precedence: bulk
> X-Cron-Env: <XDG_SESSION_ID=45>
> X-Cron-Env: <XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000>
> X-Cron-Env: <LANG=en_US.utf8>
> X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/bash>
> X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin>
> X-Cron-Env: <MAILTO=rgm>
> X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/home/rgm>
> X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=rgm>
> X-Cron-Env: <USER=rgm>
>
> skipping non-regular file "rfc-ref.txt"
> RFCs_for_errata.txt
> rfcxx00.txt
>
> sent 3,486 bytes  received 125,267 bytes  15,147.41 bytes/sec
> total size is 365,871,233  speedup is 2,841.65
>
> =========================================
>
> Is there a procmail receipt that will create a proper mailbox?  I want 
> to see if I can do this before throwing in the towel and installing 
> postfix...

CRONDARGS=-m "/usr/bin/procmail -f cron"

seems to be doing the trick.