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I have cron setup to backup every morning and email it to my gmail account and it works great. A nasty side-effect is whenever I type my password wrong using sudo I also get an email which is annoying:

incorrect login

I've googled a bit but can't find out how to turn off this email feature.

Contents of /etc/sudoers

#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults    env_reset
Defaults    mail_badpass
Defaults    secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin"

Host alias specification


User alias specification


Cmnd alias specification


User privilege specification


root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL


Members of the admin group may gain root privileges


%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL


Allow members of group sudo to execute any command


%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL


See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:


#includedir /etc/sudoers.d
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WinEunuuchs2Unix
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1 Answers1

6

From man sudoers:

 mail_badpass      Send mail to the mailto user if the user running sudo
                   does not enter the correct password.  If the command
                   the user is attempting to run is not permitted by
                   sudoers and one of the mail_all_cmnds, mail_always,
                   mail_no_host, mail_no_perms or mail_no_user flags are
                   set, this flag will have no effect.  This flag is off
                   by default.

The flag is off by default - but enabled by Ubuntu's default /etc/sudoers file, as you have noted.

Presumably, you have started receiving these messages because sudoers default mailto is root - and you configured an MTA to deliver root's mail for cron. The messages should stop if you comment out the Defaults mail_badpass line (using sudo visudo).

steeldriver
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    It is a bad idea to modify the default /etc/sudoers, as the changes may be lost after a package upgrade. Better create a file in /etc/sudoers.d with Defaults !mail_badpass. – fkraiem Dec 16 '17 at 02:51
  • echo 'Defaults !mail_badpass' | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/disable_mail_badpass – n0099 Nov 01 '23 at 02:04