Changing the From address on emails from root

Question

When we get sent emails from cron jobs etc., they tend to have a From address like "root [email protected]". Unfortunately, in Outlook, this only shows up as "root", which makes distinguishing between very similar emails from different machines quite tricky.

How can I change the From address on these emails so it's something like "foo.bar.example.com root [email protected]"?

Answer 1

The name used is root's "full name" from the password database. Change it with chfn:

chfn -f "root at foo.bar" root