Enabling a Sub Domain to Send Notification Email to Hotmail

LibertyTalk FM

• January 27, 2026 20:12
• Edited

Hello, it seems the fine folks in Redmond have suddenly started restricting notification emails sent to a software developer.

For the past 10 years "cPanelAccountName@Serverhostname" has been sending CRON notifications without issue to the developer's Hotmail address.

However as of middle of last week, they began being blocked/bounced as unauthorized sender.

Am I thinking correctly that we will need to configure a 'Local Mail Exchanger" on the server for the account and then add in the MX record to our third-party DNS host along with SPF, DKIM & DMARC?

The domain's top-level primary email is already routed through Exchange M365, but we are already in process of moving away from them as the provider and this is only for CRON notifications, so rather avoid Microsoft altogether.

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  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • January 28, 2026 02:18

  Hey there!  I would always recommend using a valid email address instead of the username@hostname address whenever possible, specifically to avoid these situations.  That might mean the cron gets more complicated by calling a script that authenticates to SMTP through PHP or another method instead of just relying on the cron function.

  I will say, I am personally guilty of breaking this rule on my personal machine, but my message gets sent to an ATT/Yahoo address so it hasn't run into a delivery problem yet, but I should likely work on this an issue sooner than later.

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  LibertyTalk FM

  • January 28, 2026 18:29

  Hola cPRex. From my understanding per the documentation, one cannot change the system's CRON outbound email address. Thus my thinking I would need to activate and authorize a local mail exchanger on the server needing to send out the notifications.

  Has this limitation been removed?

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  quietFinn

  • January 28, 2026 18:38
  • Edited

  man crond says:
  "When executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user specified in the MAILTO environment variable in the  crontab,  if  such  exists)"

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  LibertyTalk FM

  • January 28, 2026 19:01

  Yes the MAIL TO is not the issue. The problem is the MAIL TO recipient's provider, which in this case is a Hotmail account that began blocking the FROM as it is the system's subdomain in the format:

  "cPanelUser@SubDomain.ServerHostname.com"

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  quietFinn

  • January 28, 2026 19:21

  yes I was confusing myself with mail to and mail from
  Did you try to use MAILFROM ?

   

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  LibertyTalk FM

  • January 29, 2026 06:00

  For sure. I appreciate the attempt to assist nonetheless. The whole 'who's on first' aspect of attempting to resolve this issue is a pain in the keister.

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