Managing system mail

[anomie]

I'm posting to solicit your ideas and strategies for managing system mail.

On my FreeBSD servers, I get the usual mail from the periodic scripts, plus mail from a few processes that I run.

On my RHEL servers, I get the usual mail from logwatch and a few other processes.

As the number of servers grows, logging in to each every Monday morning to read through all the system mail has become a bit of a chore. (Maybe a necessary chore, but I'm wondering if there isn't a more clever approach.)

Possibilities I've entertained:

• Forwarding all system mail to my email account. (That might get out of control quickly.)
• Paring back the amount of system mail on each server significantly -- i.e. if I don't absolutely need the report I either cancel it or direct it to /dev/null. The only thing I do not like about this is it requires custom work that I'll have to deploy to each server.

Anyone care to share their ideas / strategies on this?

[deemon]

I forward system mail from all my servers to single address and let the Thunderbird to sort them out.
All regular crontab outputs go to subfolder and I will look over them once a day to check for any irregularities but leave daily/security run outputs to inbox. Nothing is sent to /dev/null.

[DutchDaemon]

All mail to root on every machine gets forwarded to my mailbox, where procmail pre-sorts and prunes them into sub-folders. Crontab mail is now limited by using " > /dev/null " -- which means I only get errors emailed to me, nothing more. The nightly jobs do get mailed to me, because I always want to see those.

[BSDKaffee]

On FreeBSD, I let the system reports go into a rotated logfile instead of mail. You can add to /etc/periodic.conf:

# Daily options
daily_output="/var/log/daily.log"

# Weekly options
weekly_output="/var/log/weekly.log"

# Monthly options
monthly_output="/var/log/monthly.log"

[hamba]

I've got a separate email account for all the server emails and just forward all the root email to this account, then maildrop sorts the emails for me the way I want them.

[anomie]

Thanks everyone. This has been driving me bonkers. I'll put together a strategy based on these suggestions.