NAME
vacation
—
provide absence notification when
receiving email
SYNOPSIS
vacation |
-i [-r
interval] |
vacation |
[-a alias]
login |
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
HISTORY
The vacation
command appeared in
4.3BSD.