I had a simple cron shell script running under Fedora 14. It runs under a user account. The shell script invoked a PHP script to do some simple batch database updates. If a step failed, the PHP script used the mail command to email me of the failure.

The problem is that an email from this job is arriving every day at 4:30 am. I deleted the job from the cron. I even renamed the shell script to make sure! The email is an old one and is stuck somewhere and I don't know where. I restarted the sendmail service and that did not clear it. I don't even know why it happens at 4:30am! At one time the cron ran it at 4:30 but now its not even in cron! And as I said, I renamed the shell script to make sure.

Based on the time that the mystery email appears, you might look for cron jobs in /etc/cron.daily (not all Linux distros have this).

Scripts there will typically run around that time of day by default. There will be an entry in the /etc/crontab file that determines when those daily jobs run - look for a line that contains "run-parts /etc/cron.daily".

problem solved. email was comming from old server. Had migrated from old server to new server and cron was still active on old server.