On Fri, 17 May 1996, Allen Briggs wrote:

.. > To adhere to "the principle of least astonishment" I still recommend to
.. > have all root's cron generated output end up the same place by default.
.. 
.. Actually, by default, cron output is mailed to the owner of the cron
.. job--root in this case.
.. 
When mentioning the "principle of least astonishment" I am thinking of the
fact that setting MAILTO in root's crontab will cause all cron generated
output for root to be mailed to somebody else, EXCEPT for the output from
/etc/security. To me this is inconsistent, and that was the reason for my
PR.

best regards
Erik Bertelsen