Vacation

You will be on vacation, on a business trip or for any other reason out of the office and would like to automatically send a message to those who send an e-mail to you? Then you should consider to use the program 'vacation' and to make appropriate configurations.

On Debian (Sarge) you simply enter: apt-get install vacation
Then you have to do two things: Create a message that will be sent to those who send e-mail to you, and second, configure how this should be done.

1. Creating the auto-respond message

Create an email message that will be sent to those, who send e-mail to you while you are away from e-mail.
For this purpose you must create a file in your home-directory with the name .vacation.msg (note the leading '.' in the filename!) with the following content:

From: username@host.domain (Your Name)
Subject: Out of the office
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk

I am out of the office until 23 August 2004.
Your mail concerning "$SUBJECT"
will be read when I'm back.

In urgent cases, you may contact Mr. Brian Helper (helper@your.domain)

Your Name

2 a. Simple forwarding

Should you use 'simple forwarding' (i.e. you have no .procmailrc active or anything else, which processes your e-mails automatically), you should create a file in your home-directory with the name '.forward' (note the leading '.' in the filename. This file should look as follows:
\peter, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a peter.miller -a p.miller peter"
where the names after the '-a' parameter(s) are all your e-mail aliases and where the last word (here 'peter'; whithout preceeding '-a') is your actual login-name.

2 b. Advanced forwarding

Should you have 'advanced forwarding' already enabled (e.g. through procmail because you are running SpamAssassin) you should use one of the two possibilities described on http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/mathcomputing/?page=faq#HowdoIsetavacationmessage. The easier of the two options provided there is described here. Add the following into your existing file .procmailrc in your home-directory:

## Start stuff vor vacation program
# enter each alias with "-a aliasname" and at the *end* the login name !
:0 c
| /usr/bin/vacation -a peter.miller -a p.miller peter
## End stuff vor vacation program

:0E:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
Mail/Spam

## Start stuff vor vacation program
# enter each alias with "-a aliasname" and at the *end* the login name !
:0 c
| /usr/bin/vacation -a peter.miller -a p.miller peter
## End stuff vor vacation program

}
# End of :0 E wrapper around BYPASSWD