NAME

vacation — provide absence notification when receiving email

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

vacation returns a message to the sender of a message telling them that you are currently not reading your mail. The intended use is in a .forward file. For example, your .forward file might have:

\eric, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a allman eric"

which would send messages to you (assuming your login name was eric) and reply to any messages for “eric” or “allman”.

The options are as follows:

-a alias

Handle messages for alias in the same manner as those received for the user's login name.

-i

Initialize the vacation database files. It should be used before you modify your .forward file.

-r interval

Set the reply interval to interval days. The default is one week. An interval of “0” or “infinite” (actually, any non-numeric character) will never send more than one reply.

Messages will not be replied to if any of the following conditions are true:

• Message are not “To:” or “Cc:” a valid login (or alias supplied using the -a option).
• Messages are from “???-REQUEST”, “Postmaster”, “UUCP”, “MAILER”, or “MAILER-DAEMON” (where these strings are case insensitive).
• A “Precedence: bulk”, “Precedence: list”, or “Precedence: junk” line is included in the mail headers.
• An “Auto-Submitted” line is included in the mail headers with a value of anything but “no”.
• A “List-Id” line (with any value) is included in the mail headers.

The people who have sent you messages are maintained as a Berkeley DB database in the file .vacation.db in your home directory.

vacation expects a file .vacation.msg, in your home directory, containing a message to be sent back to each sender. It should be an entire message (including headers). For example, it might contain:

From: eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Allman)
Subject: I am on vacation
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk

I am on vacation until July 22.
If you have something urgent,
please contact Keith Bostic <bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU>.
--eric

Any occurrence of the string $SUBJECT in .vacation.msg will be replaced by the subject of the message that triggered the vacation program.

vacation reads the incoming message from standard input, checking the message headers for either the UNIX “From” line or a “Return-Path” header to determine the sender. If both are present the sender from the “Return-Path” header is used.

Fatal errors, such as calling vacation with incorrect arguments, or with non-existent logins, are logged in the system log file, using syslog(3).

FILES

~/.vacation.db

database file

~/.vacation.msg

message to send

SEE ALSO

dbopen(3), syslog(3), smtpd(8)

HISTORY

The vacation command appeared in 4.3BSD.