CRON not sending output to email, but writing output /var/log/cron

I have a Rocky 8.5 server. Initial settings in Cron as follows (same as our other servers, which work fine forwarding cron output emails)

HOSTNAME=xxxx
CVS_RSH=ssh
MAILTO=yyyy@zzzz

35 * * * * /usr/bin/echo "XXXXX 123 CRON REDIRECT CAPTURE" >/tmp/mycommand.log 2>&1

Which works fine, and writes to the log. But I want it to send an email instead with output. If I get the command to call sendmail direct it works fine also, implying it can email ok.

42 * * * * /usr/bin/echo "XXXXX 123 CRON REDIRECT CAPTURE" | sendmail -v <my email> 2>&1

works fine.

However, if I just have

35 * * * * /usr/bin/echo "XXXXX 123 CRON REDIRECT CAPTURE" 2>&1

This gets written to /var/log/cron instead of getting emailed.

Oct 27 16:35:01 <host> CROND[1836181]: (<user>) CMD (/usr/bin/echo "XXXXX 123 CRON REDIRECT CAPTURE"  2>&1 )
Oct 27 16:35:01 <host> CROND[1836176]: (<user>) CMDOUT (XXXXX 123 CRON REDIRECT CAPTURE)

Am I missing a step or some other CRON config somewhere ? I can't find any other mention of anything in manpage etc (other than it saying crond -s would forward to a syslog).

I can see cron running with

root        1296       1  0 <date> ?        00:02:35 /usr/sbin/crond -n

sendmail is actually a link to exim if it makes any difference, but seems to work ok when testing from console manually.

Fixed by simply restarting cron with

service crond restart

Not sure what the underlying issue was that led to it going astray. Possibly restarting the server with a broken email setup which was later fixed, but cron needed a restart after that was fixed maybe ?