Yeah, I hadn't considered the utility of this in a situation with many people submitting jobs to run on mainframes. To me, the logical default would be to outpu

Yeah, I hadn't considered the utility of this in a situation with many people submitting jobs to run on mainframes. To me, the logical default would be to output to logfiles rather than depend on an email server being available, but in the historical context I suppose it makes sense. About 20 years ago when I set up my first server and wrote my first cron tasks on it, I didn't know that cron sent output to email. The root email address on that server was set up with a mailbox on the server itself, that was unused and never checked. After a year or more, I started mysteriously running out of disk space and was baffled until I found 10+ Gb of unread emails in that account.