Web Panel Cronjob Changes
After much research we have noticed that most people who set up cronjobs either through the web panel or through the crontab command line utility never read the emails it sends them, and, in fact, most probably don’t even know they are receiving them. These unwanted and unnoticed emails use up considerable amounts of space on our file servers, as well as causing performance issues if several of the maildirs they are delivered to fill up to capacity, and can cause ssh logins to become very slow, as most shells will check for new email for you at login, and checking 300000 emails can take some time.
Because of this, we’re going to make some changes to the web panel to support changing the email address a cronjob’s output is delivered to. Yes, huge feature, we know 
The reason it’s being announced here rather than just sneaking quietly into everyone’s web panels is because of the implications. Since we do not have existing data for where emails are being sent, we’ve decided that having it default to being disabled would be the most logical choice.
What does that mean for you? After next Tuesday (February 26th) when you edit a cronjob in the web panel, any other cronjobs associated with that user will get their email delivery disabled until you modify the email delivery settings for those jobs. To fix this, simply modify the other jobs and change their email delivery settings!
If you have any questions about this change, please feel free to contact our technical support department and they’ll be happy to help you out!
Thanks a bunch!
Update 2008-02-26: this is now live. Please let us know if you have any questions or problems by sending in a support ticket!
- The Happy DreamHost Make Filers Happy Team.
.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:23 am
6 days since the last announcement!!! You guys are slacking… get back to breaking things!
February 21st, 2008 at 10:28 am
I noticed too, there is something going on my stuff is messed up.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:43 am
I check mines via ssh, and then using mutt. quite simple!
February 21st, 2008 at 11:57 am
BUGabundo, that’s a good idea. I checked mine with mutt, but have no mail. I guess that means my cron jobs aren’t producing output.
My command-line-created cron jobs do not appear in the panel. Is that normal for everyone, or should they automagically appear?
The support wiki page is all about the panel:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Cron_Jobs
The (older) knowledge-base article is all about the command-line:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/KB_/_Unix_/_Cron_Jobs_and_Persistent_Processes
(I know this is not a support forum; just thought I’d ask.)
February 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Ouch my system work a cron jobs
al not statics…
hoteles en bariloche
February 21st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
“The Happy DreamHost Make Filers Happy Team.”
February 21st, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Mkay, thanks for the notice
February 21st, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I know I am not supposed to ask questions here but the support portion of my panel is messed up, so how do I get support? It ask me to fill out the first step then it just returns nothing. Does anyone know what I should do?
February 21st, 2008 at 6:32 pm
same happens to me when i’m using the latest version of FireFox. tried it in Safari and it worked fine so i guess it’s just a compatibility issue
February 21st, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Ahh yes, I should have thought of that considering I have been having other weird problems with this Firefox Beta. Thanks Josh.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Excellent idea!
I never knew how to retrieve the emails my crons sent (so I ended up setting them to dev/null for both success and failure), mainly because the shell user that runs them on my site does not have any emails associated to them
They just got piling up in the maildir and every now and then (maybe weekly) I logged in the shell and simply rm’d them
will be looking forward to next tuesday
as usual (I think I’ll never get tired of saying this)
AWESOME JOB DH!!!!
You’re worth every penny
February 21st, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Yeah the support area been screwed up for me in the firefox 3 beta for a while, but it still works fine in IE 6 & 7.
I don’t have a problem with cron job emails, if I don’t want the output to get mailed to me all I have to do is have the output in the cron job sent to /dev/null.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:04 am
phil+peach+titanic+blingy RSS feed always shows that the issues are resolved, even when they are not…just an fyi….at least for me, anyway
I’m using the latest version of Firefox.
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 am
Instead of bugging our DreamHost support people, anyone here care to tell me how to set up a forward of the e-mail that goes to my shell account’s Maildir to some other e-mail address, so 1) I read it as it happens, and 2) it doesn’t pile up on the server?
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:22 am
I wonder how many people are going in and purging old emails … I did!
If you have a whole lot of emails (I only had about 3,000), removing all of them using rm won’t work (argument list too long). If you want to purge *ALL* of your emails (I had no use for all the return-emails), just use this at the command line:
find . | xargs rm
It will give you a message that you cannot remove ‘.’ or ‘..’ but it will still remove all the emails. If you don’t want the error just use “*.com*” in place of “.”
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
Mustang,
To forward your cronjob emails just type “MAILTO=youremail@domain.com” at the top of the crontab file (without the quotes of course)
If you’re using PHP’s mail() function you can keep returned emails from piling up by adding a “Return-Path” value to your headers. For example:
$headers .= “From: Your Name \n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: Your Name \n”;
$headers .= “Return-Path: Your Name \n”;
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:32 am
i can not still enter my site, so nobody can.
when will someone solve the problem … all of my sites are DOWN
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:51 am
Thanks, Matt. I would rather not hack my CMS’s code but I might just have to.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:54 am
Mustang, you’re using Jooma right? You don’t have to hack the code, just go to Global Configuration -> Mail Tab and as the Mailer change it from “PHP Mail Function” to “SMTP Server.” That should at least take care of the undeliverable response messages.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Superb! Thanks Matt.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
@Viking: you could always just put this at the top of your crontab:
MAILTO=”"
@josh: yes. these ginormous maildirs make filers unhappy. unhappy filers means unhappy customers
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
@kitchen
yup, you’re right. I didn’t know about that at the time I had the problem so they got sent to the shell. I can live with not getting the errors by mail so I disabled them
Now that the system will become more newbie-friendly (yay! for me hehe) I might aswell start using them again
February 24th, 2008 at 3:58 am
This is a very welcome change.
February 24th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Welcome change, thank you!
Oh and mehmet , you’re and idiot for posting outages here… email support@… or just use the web panel like the rest of us.
February 25th, 2008 at 9:29 am
This is great, I always end up deleting this emails… This will relief my email download time every morning!
February 25th, 2008 at 9:29 am
This is great, I always end up deleting these emails… This will relief my email download time every morning!
February 27th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Thanks for the heads up which is a nice touch instead of finding out after the fact.
March 6th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
See also http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Crontab#Breakage