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I have an Ubuntu 18.04 cloud server. Every week lately I get an email from cron reminding me that there's an upgrade to 20.04 available.

I get it, cron. I really do.

I'd like to stop this reminder only without disabling cron emails in general. How can I notify my buddy cron that I'm aware of the upgrade and they can stop emailing me about it?

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  • ;-( what did you expect if you deliverd your soul and your hardware and your data to the gods of the cloud? ;-( Nov 8, 2020 at 13:17

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Seems like a duplicate of: How to disable release upgrade notification emails? While this is for 14.04 the general guideline should hold still, in particular - stopping that one job in cron.

Top answer:

By default cron sends mail to the email address mentioned in the MAILTO environment variable on crontab, presumably you have set the email address, so any STDOUT/STDERR from any cron job will be sent to the email address.

The output is from /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/release-upgrade-motd script (run by the weekly job /etc/cron.weekly/update-notifier-common) that checks for a new version, and dump the content of /var/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/release-upgrade-available file.

You have a few options:

  • Disable the job

  • Redirect STDOUT/STDERR from the script to /dev/null

  • Set MAILTO="" so that no mail will be sent. As /usr/sbin/anacron exists the script will be run by anacron, so setting this in /etc/anacrontab would do too.

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  • Is there no way to tell the "upgrade available" notification system to stop? What if I delete the release-upgrade-motd script, or make it not executable? Nov 8, 2020 at 14:13
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    And thanks, I agree it's a a duplicate. Probably should have vtc instead of answering. Nov 8, 2020 at 14:18

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