I'm concerned that cron jobs can fail silently for an indefinite period of time on vanilla Ubuntu Desktop 12.04.1 (Precise), and no one will notice. I would like to get a notification whenever a system cron job prints some output or just fails.
I know it is possible to install a mail server (e.g. postfix), configure it for local-only delivery, set up an alias so that root's mail is delivered to my normal user account and configure a mail client to check my local mailbox.
Are there any lightweight alternatives to this solution in Ubuntu?