crontab job output not generating email

Question

I have been running many cron jobs (on various operating systems, CentOS, for example) that normally run with no output. I usually keep an eye on my jobs by checking my email. I use the fact that any errors will generate output as a simple monitoring mechanism, because any output will show up as an email. No email means everything is running as expected.

After installing a new machine with Rocky Linux 9, my cron jobs run, but errors do not generate any email. For instance, if my crontab looks like this:

* * * * * date >> /tmp/cron.out && echo 'This is cron'

I should get the date appended to the /tmp/cron.out file and an email saying 'This is cron' every minute.

The /tmp/cron.out file keeps getting the date added every minute, so I know the job is running, but all files in /var/spool/mail have zero bytes, so no email is getting generated.

All the documentation for cron shows that any job output will generate an email. But now I can't tell if my jobs have thrown any errors.

Has anything changed in Rocky Linux 9 so that job output no longer goes to email? Is there anything I can do to restore the original functionality?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

This is a new machine , hence it may not be fully configured in terms of necessary Services.

Specifically , the Mailing Service may be Down or not configured in that new machine.

Installing & starting Postfix , with a restart of Crond , has resolved the Issue here.

[[ Why was it necessary to restart Crond after Installing & Starting Postfix : Maybe Crond checked for mail server , noticed that it was not running & thus it skipped mailing. When Crond was restarted , it checked for mail server , noticed that it was running & thus it started mailing ! ]]