Redirecting email for root

[doctordruidphd]

This is really more of a debian question than kubuntu per se, but since they are closely related:

k/Ubuntu is supposed to have the root account disabled. But, by default, many applications, such as rkhunter, debsecan, and other things run as cron jobs, send their output in emails to root. It is possible to read those by invoking alpine in a sudo konsole. It is also possible to configure some of those applications to send to a different user. But a better way would be if, by default, any emails coming in for root could be redirected to a normal user.

How to do that is probably buried somewhere in the postfix documentation, but so far I have not found it. Anybody know off the top how to do it? That is, direct incoming mail for root to a normal user account?

[wizard10000]

Re: Redirecting email for root

This is really more of a debian question than kubuntu per se, but since they are closely related:

k/Ubuntu is supposed to have the root account disabled. But, by default, many applications, such as rkhunter, debsecan, and other things run as cron jobs, send their output in emails to root. It is possible to read those by invoking alpine in a sudo konsole. It is also possible to configure some of those applications to send to a different user. But a better way would be if, by default, any emails coming in for root could be redirected to a normal user.

How to do that is probably buried somewhere in the postfix documentation, but so far I have not found it. Anybody know off the top how to do it? That is, direct incoming mail for root to a normal user account?

Simple.

Create a file in root's home directory named .forward

In the file all you need is the email address where you want the mail forwarded.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Redirecting email for root

Create a file in root's home directory named .forward

Yeah, I suppose that will work on ubuntu. Most debian distributions, however, prevent mail from being sent to the root account at all, before the .forward file is read. So I suppose this really is a question for the debian forum.

But you're right, that will fix it for k/ubuntu.