How do I set the sender address for mail sent from my cron jobs?

There are two ways you can specify the sender address for your cron email messages:

The MAILFROM variable

You can set a MAILFROM variable in your crontab, like this:

MAILFROM=sender@mydomain.com
MAILTO=recipient@mydomain.com

* * * * * some_cronjob_goes_here 2>&1

With these settings, any output from your cron jobs will be sent to your MAILTO address, using your MAILFROM address as the sender.

Note that this applies to all of your cron jobs. If you want to use different mail settings for individual cron jobs, then use the "pipe to the mail command" method, described below.

Pipe to the mail command

If you want to use mail settings different from your MAILTO and MAILFROM variables for a specific job, then you can specify your sender and recipient addresses by piping the output of individual cron jobs into the system mail command, like this:

* * * * * some_cronjob_goes_here 2>&1 | mail -s "message subject here" -S from=sender@mydomain.com recipient@mydomain.com