One of the neater functions of WordPress (the software I run khaosx on) is the ability to set the system up to recieve posts via email. Anything you see in the category “moblog” is something I posted via email.

It’s really easy:

1. Setup a mailbox
2. Set WordPress to look for email in the box.
3. Setup a cron job to run the page that looks for email.

My cron job runs every 5 minutes, and uses a command line broswer (CURL) to process a script file that dumps the email into a post.

Here’s where the train started to leave the track:

>/dev/null

The UNIX folks know where I’m headed now. For the rest of you, here’s the thing. The cron job takes any output from the job itself and emails it to the default system email account.

UNLESS YOU REDIRECT THAT OUTPUT TO /DEV/NULL

(/dev/null is the ether, the void, the place where all things go, the universal trashcan).

This site has been online and checking for mail posts since April. The default system account is NEVER checked by yours truly. Until today, that is.

When I found 69,490 emails in the system account. I suspect that about 69,200 of them are emails from cron.

What a doofus.