Crontab and sSMTP

Question

My server is Ubuntu 12.04.3 Cron jobs are working fine. I can send emails through command line, either using mail, ssmtp or sendmail. I have set the correct email address on top of the crontab -e

[email protected]

* * * * *  echo blaaah

But what I get in mail.log is

sSMTP[4267]: 550 5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender

Which is strange as I am able to send email through command line. Any ideas?

Solution

I had a similar problem. The answer for me was actually quite simple.

The user/environment under which cron executes could not find the ssmtp binary. Simply by adding the full path to it achieved success.

# m     h       dom     mon     dow     command
0       9       *       *       *       /usr/sbin/ssmtp [email protected] < /home/a/a-msg.txt

Comments

[Aurelia]

cron does run as root, right? You can try adding root to the mail group, but it shouldn't be required. usermod -a -G mail root

[akarapatis]

I am aware of this solution. But it is only a workaround. I preferred a solution that applied to the whole crontab

[meanbunny]

Been looking all over for this solution.

[E.S.]

Hmm this didn't do anything for me. I assume the /usr/sbin/ssmtp [email protected] < xyz xyz refers to the stdout of your command. I get a 550 error this way. Am I missing some steps?