Indiana University

IU Webmaster

Email changes on Webserve

Beginning 4am on Friday, June 20th, mail changes to the Webserve environment will result in undeliverable email being sent to the preferred email address of the account or, if the preferred email address for the account has not been set, to the account owner's personal email address. This email is typically generated in one of two ways:
  1. Email is sent from the account to an undeliverable address resulting in "bounced" email
  2. Cron jobs are run that produce output, and that output is not written to a file
In these cases, the email will be sent to the preferred email address for the account if one is set (to set or change the preferred email address for an account see: http://kb.iu.edu/data/berh.html). If no preferred email address is set, the email will be sent to the personal email address of the owner.

For cron generated messages, it is recommended that you adjust the output of your cron application to a file or /dev/null. For example, if your crontab had the following entry: 

0 * * * * /ip/myaccount/bin/my_cron_app.pl

At the end of the line, you can have the output piped to a file by adding: 

0 * * * * /ip/myaccount/bin/my_cron.pl >> /ip/my_account/bin/my_cron.pl 2>&1

The '>>' above appends to the log file; a single '>' will cause the file to be overwritten. If you never want to see the output, pipe to /dev/null: 

0 * * * * /ip/myaccount/bin/my_cron.pl > /dev/null  2>&1

After making either of these adjustments you will need to resubmit your crontab. To do so, you should type: 

crontab myaccount.crontab

In the above line, you would replace "myaccount.crontab" with the name of your crontab file.