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Status Submitted
Workspace AIX
Created by Guest
Created on May 22, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Global option to prevent cron from sending mail to users

If a command in someones crontab generates output to stdin or stderr and is not redirected a mail is geneareted to the user who ownes the crontab.

While this might have been a good idea 30 years ago, it can cause serious troube in modern environments where sendmail has been disabled for security reasons.
In such a configuration thousands of files are written to /var/spool/clientmqueue/ where they stay forever since the disabled sendmail daemon is not picking them.

In large environment with user owned crontabs it is not very comfortable to go through all crontabs and redirection to the commands.

Instead a global option to cron would be needed to not mail non-redirected output to the crontab owner.

On Linux there is a way to prevent cron from sending mail:
You can set the MAILTO variable to an empty value at the first line of the crontab file - so that cron is not sending mail at all.

MAILTO=""

There is no such option on AIX.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Jun 3, 2026

    As an IT consultant working with multiple enterprise clients running AIX environments, I frequently encounter this issue across different organizations and industries. What stands out is that this is not a niche edge case – it is a recurring operational problem that affects any AIX environment where sendmail has been disabled for security hardening reasons.

    The pattern is always the same: security teams lock down local mail delivery as part of a baseline hardening policy, cron continues to generate output silently, and over time /var/spool/clientmqueue/ fills up with thousands of undeliverable files. By the time it is noticed, disk space is affected and the cleanup effort is significant.

    The Linux ecosystem solved this cleanly with the MAILTO="" directive. From a consulting perspective, the absence of an equivalent mechanism on AIX regularly forces a choice between two imperfect options: either accepting the accumulation of dead mail files, or investing considerable effort in auditing and modifying every user-owned crontab across potentially hundreds of systems.

    A global cron option to suppress mail delivery on AIX would eliminate this recurring pain point and align AIX behavior with what administrators already know from Linux. I strongly support this idea on behalf of the clients I work with.

    Reply

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