(Up-to-date source of this post.)
I've found out that one of the simplest ways how to send emails from scripts running on your workstation is ssmtp (my ex-colleague showed it to me). It's very easy to install and setup. Basically you just edit one or two lines inssmtp.conf. However there's a caveat; the ssmtp does not consider aliases when sending email. So the cron was trying to send email to non existent email address like root@mybox.local.domain. To fix this problem you have to do the aliasing in the mail program by adding lines like these into /etc/mail.rc:alias root root<username@company.com> alias postmaster postmaster<username@company.com> alias username username<username@company.com>
I also put this variable into my crontab
MAILTO=username@company.com