I have 3 solaris 9 servers
1 allows me to use MAILTO in the crontab, but the other 2 dont.

Error

MAILTO=oracle
crontab: error on previous line; unexpected character found in line.
crontab: errors detected in input, no crontab file generated.

Any Ideas??

Can you post the entire line? It is difficult for anyone that wants to help you to proceed with just the info that you have given. You can mask out things like ip addresses, email ids and such.

Hi Blow
that is the entire line
the thing is that the servers were producing crontab mail, but for some reason they all stopped producing it.
as soon as i entered MAILTO="oracle" one of them started producing mail
if i use the same line on the other two servers it fails with the error mentioned earlier.
I guess ive got two qstns
1, why did all the systems suddenly stop producing mail
2, why one system will accept the MAILTO line and the others wont

I believe Torch was referring to the line command in your crontab, not the error.

This is the entry i used

# Test to enable mail
MAILTO="oracle"
#
00 12 * * 6 /export/home/......................

this is NOT a valid crontab syntax - you cannot do that.
I think you want this:

By default any output from the crontab should be mailed to the owner i.e. oracle
It had been working fine for years, but now decided to fail
maybe i should be looking at why it happend and not try to tackle the symptoms.
The previous suggestion of incorporating the mailto within the command line isnt feasible because i would need to use a seperate mailto for each line