Linux – How to get the cron daemon to send me email when a job fails with an error

By default, cron will email the owner of the account under which the crontab is running.

The system-wide crontab is in /etc/crontab runs under the user `root'

Because root is used widely, I'd recommend adding a root alias to your /etc/aliases file anyways. (run 'newaliases' after)

The normal way to structure this is for root to be aliased to another user on the system, e.g. for me I'd alias 'root' to 'phil' (my user account) and alias 'phil' to my external email address.

If you have a specific user cron that you'd like emailed to you on output, you can use /etc/aliases again (providing you have superuser access) to redirect the user to another email address, or you can use the following at the top of your crontab:

MAILTO="email@domain.com"

If mail should be sent to a local user, you may put just the username instead:

MAILTO=someuser

If you need more information see crontab(5) by running:

man 5 crontab

For cronie cron (which is recommended for example by Gentoo Handbook), there is "-s" argument to cron call, which sends the job output to the system log using syslog.