It appears that debian's "man 5 crontab" has lost some useful details,
such that:

      "By default, cron sends a mail using the 'Content-Type:' header of
       'text/plain' with the 'charset=' parameter set to the
       'charmap/codeset' of the locale in which crond(8) is started up,
       i.e., either the default system locale, if no LC_* environment
       variables are set, or the locale specified by the LC_* environment
       variables (see locale(7)).  Different character encodings can be
       used for mailing cron job outputs by setting the CONTENT_TYPE and
       CONTENT_TRANSFER_ENCODING variables in a crontab to the correct
       values of the mail headers of those names."

(I'm afraid I don't have a say in that matter; Prtobably seen as
improvement by some)

Ralph.

On Thu, Jan 08, 2026 at 09:12:26AM +0100, Rene Kita wrote:
> On my newly setup Excalibur box I receive cron mails as
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable which makes reading them
> with mail(1) unpleasant.
>
> Using mail(1) itself or just printf'ing to /usr/sbin/sendmail mails are
> not send as quoted-printable.
>
> Here is an example bad mail:
>
> #v+
> Message 1:
> >From kt@??? Tue Jan 06 09:54:02 2026
> Envelope-to: kt@???
> Delivery-date: Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:54:02 +0100
> From: root@??? (Cron Daemon)
> To: kt@???
> Subject: Cron <kt@x280> backup mobile: -Lahv
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/home/kt>
> X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/home/kt/.local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin>
> X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh>
> X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=kt>
> Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:54:02 +0100
>
> ssh: connect to host mobile port 22: Connection refused=0D
> #v-
>
> How can I turn this off?
>
> #v+
> root@x280:~# more /etc/default/cron
> # Cron configuration options
>
> # Whether to read the system's default environment files (if present)
> # If set to "yes", cron will set a proper mail charset from the
> # locale information. If set to something other than 'yes', the default
> # charset 'C' (canonical name: ANSI_X3.4-1968) will be used.
> #
> # This has no effect on tasks running under cron; their environment can
> # only be changed via PAM or from within the crontab; see crontab(5).
> READ_ENV="yes"
>
> # Extra options for cron, see cron(8)
> #
> # For example, to enable LSB name support in /etc/cron.d/, use
> # EXTRA_OPTS='-l'
> #
> # Or, to log standard messages, plus jobs with exit status != 0:
> # EXTRA_OPTS='-L 5'
> #
> # For quick reference, the currently available log levels are:
> # 0 no logging (errors are logged regardless)
> # 1 log start of jobs
> # 2 log end of jobs
> # 4 log jobs with exit status != 0
> # 8 log the process identifier of child process (in all logs)
> #
> EXTRA_OPTS=""
>
> root@x280:~# more /etc/default/locale
> # File generated by update-locale
> LANG="C.UTF-8"
>
> t@x280:~# more /etc/environment
> root@x280:~#
> #v-
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