Vacation autoresponder messages

su - user user~# vacation

Run vacation twice if it's a first time user, and give the user bash in the passwd file.

this creates a .forward message with the mailbox to deliver to and a pipe to the vacation program with the aliases to reply for. it then creates a .vacation.msg file with the text of the autoreply and does a vacation -i to initialise.

after vacation is ended, run vacation again to turn it off.

If a user has aliases they need to be added after vacation -a and before the username in the .forward file

You can also do one alias per forward file command (forward file commands are seperated by comma's):

\monique, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a info@vdb-consultancy.nl monique", "|/usr/bin/vacation -a monique@vdb-consultancy.nl monique",

or

\monique, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a info@vdb-consultancy.nl -a monique@vdb-consultancy.nl monique"

or

\rbax, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a r.bax -a ronald -a rb rbax"

(you don't need the domain names)

(untested)

BUT When testing: Vacation builds up a database of addresses to which it has allready sent autoreplies. It standard only sends one message to one email address. This means if you try to test each alias, you have to re-initialise the database before trying the next alias using vacation -i

.vacation.msg can be formatted

From: rb@more-in.com (Ronald Bax - More In)
Subject: Out of Office

Message text

The From line determines the from address, otherwise it will use the account name@mail.server.address

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Other ways of doing autoresponders:

piping through yaa http://frost.ath.cx/software/yaa/ (howto http://www.howtoforge.org/autoresponders_for_virtual_postfix_users?s=599ba8c645f33e936910e3055ec886de&)

Use usermin (http://www.webmin.com/index6.html)