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I'm getting a lot of mail in my root user's mail account. This appears to be mostly reports and errors from things like cron scripts. I'm trying to work though and solve these things, possibly even have them be piped to some sort of "dashboard" - but until then how can I have these messages go to my personal e-mail account instead?

For a bonus point, what is a good dashboard style tool that I could send these types of notices to so that I could review them all? Possibly a nagios plugin, or a ticketing software like Jira? I'm new to the world of sysadmin so I'm not sure what the best practice for something like that is - especially if there are multiple servers generating things like this.

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You should ask your second question as a separate question if you really want an answer to it. – cjm Dec 13 '11 at 8:40

3 Answers

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Any user, including root, can forward their local email by putting the forwarding address in a file called ~/.forward. You can have multiple addresses there, all on one line and separated by comma. If you want both local delivery and forwarding, put root@localhost as one of the addresses.

The system administrator can define email aliases in the file /etc/aliases. This file contains lines like root: cwd@mailhost.example.com, /root/mailbox; the effect is the same as having cwd@mailhost.example.com, /root/mailbox in ~root/.forward. You may need to run a program such as newaliases after changing /etc/aliases.

Note that the workings of .forward and /etc/aliases depend on your MTA. Most MTAs implement the main features provided by the traditional sendmail, but check your MTA's documentation.

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hmm, does cwd@mailhost.example.com, /root/mailbox work on ubuntu? it goes to the first address but not the local mailbox for root, even after running newaliases. I also tried /var/mail/root without success... – cwd Dec 14 '11 at 1:37
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@cwd It does for Postfix. Hmm, I think recent versions of Ubuntu install a limited MTA which doesn't do any local delivery in the default desktop installation. Older Ubuntu releases or server installations install Postfix by default, and Postfix does support my examples. – Gilles Dec 14 '11 at 10:07
Thanks. I think root's .forward file may have been overriding the multiple addresses I had in the alias file. It's working now, thanks for your help :) – cwd Dec 14 '11 at 14:20
up vote 2 down vote

Simply create /root/.forward and place your email address in this file. It will be forwarded to your external mail address.

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up vote 0 down vote

in .forward myaddress@example.com, root@thisserver.com

with this I get an email on my box and it is also written to /var/mail/root. (my distribution is debian with postfix) Replace "thisserver.com" with the domain name of your server

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