How to set Logwatch sender address?

[craue]

Subject

I would like some feedback concerning a use case.

Description

By default, when enabling logwatch and pflogsumm reports, pflogsumm sender address is "mailserver-report@hostname.domainname" and logwatch sender address is "root@hostname.domainname". Now I'd like to change both to be sent from "whatever@domainname" but couldn't find out how.

I tried various environment variables, but none actually changes the sender e-mail address for the logwatch report ...

• REPORT_SENDER: sets sender for pflogsumm only, not logwatch
• POSTMASTER_ADDRESS: sets recipient addresses (for pflogsumm and logwatch) only, not sender
• PFLOGSUMM_SENDER: sets sender for pflogsumm only, as documented (and expected)
• LOGWATCH_SENDER: undocumented and obviously not working (but I wanted to be sure)

So is there a way to set the sender address for logwatch as well?

[casperklein]

You can try putting something like this in your user-patches.sh (not tested):

echo "MailFrom = foo@example.com" >> /etc/logwatch/conf/logfiles/maillog.conf

Edit:

If that doesn't work, here are two more things to try:

sed -i 's|^mailer = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"|mailer = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -f foo@example.com"|' /usr/share/logwatch/dist.conf/logwatch.conf

or

sed -i 's|^mailer = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"|mailer = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -f foo@example.com"|' /usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf

[craue]

Thank you for the quick response. This led me in the right direction.

echo "MailFrom = foo@example.com" >> /etc/logwatch/conf/logfiles/maillog.conf indeed doesn't make a difference.

Taking a look at /usr/share/logwatch/dist.conf/logwatch.conf revealed the entry MailFrom = root, so I changed this instead and it's working: sed -i 's|^MailFrom = root$|MailFrom = foo@example.com|' /usr/share/logwatch/dist.conf/logwatch.conf

Interestingly, other directives put into /etc/logwatch/conf/logfiles/maillog.conf are ignored as well, like Detail = High. I also needed to add it in /usr/share/logwatch/dist.conf/logwatch.conf.

Having an env var at least for the sender address would be much more convenient, though. 😏

[georglauterbach]

@craue If you'd like to give it a try, you may refer to #2358 which provides a bit of structure for someone new to the project.