Vacation at the BIC
Vacation program
This is one simple way to set up an Auto-Reply message, useful while you travel, vacation, or try to avoid your advisor.
To set up the vacation
program:
- With your favourite text editor, create a file called
$HOME/.vacation.msg
that will contain your auto-reply vacation message. This file should start with the headers below. It’s important to have the headersFrom/Subject/Precedence
with correct values.
From: me@bic.mni.mcgill.ca Subject: I am on vacation Precedence: bulk I am not here. I shall return.
- Start a
ssh
session to the BIC login host,login.bic.mni.mcgill.ca
. - Initialize the
vacation
database. Do this before modifying your$HOME/.forward
as explained below.
vacation -i
- On a BIC login terminal run
vacation
and follow the instructions. If you `view’ or `edit’ the.vacation.msg
or the.forward
file, type `q’ to move on. Suggested option-r 3
sets the reply delay to 3 days. The default is 1 week. It’s up to you.
vacation -r 3
- Test your auto-reply!
To turn off the auto-reply, run vacation
again, and choose to `not enable’ the vacation
program. Or simply edit your $HOME/.forward
file and remove the vacation stuff. It should look like:
\me, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a my-other-alias me"
For further details, read the man page: man vacation
.
Disclaimer: This method replies to all mail that is not indicated as `bulk’, including SPAM! To avoid this, use the procmail
recipe below.
Procmail recipe
A more elegant method is to use procmail
, a very powerfull automatic mail processor. This is a bit more involved but it works much better that the vacation
program above.
Procmail
recipes for a user are defined in the file $HOME/.procmailrc
. This file is automatically detected by the mail server so you don’t have to do any thing special, just make sure the recipes are doing what they are supposed to do! Again, read the man pages! apropos procmail
will list all the man pages related to procmail
. man procmailex
is very helpfull in providing quite a few recipes examples and man procmailrc
explains the syntax used for the recipes. For a quick start, see the NOTES
section at the end of the procmail
man page.
You should include the instructions for the auto-reply in your .procmail.rc
file AFTER the spamassassin
routines, if you use any of the SpamAssassin
to weed out spam. Start with HowToBlockSpam to learn about SpamAssassin
.
Below, the BIC username is assumed to be bic-user
. Substitute you own. Be extremely careful if you cut and paste the following!
(:source:) <insert your spamassassin stuff and other recipes here>
- Vacation thingie. Must be at the end only!
SENDMAIL=/usr/lib/sendmail
- 0 Whc
- .vacation.lock
- !^FROM_DAEMON
- !^X-Loop: bic-user@bic.mni.mcgill.ca
| formail -rD 8192 .vacation.cache
- Only run this rule if the last rule didn’t match,
- meaning it will only mail each user once.
:0 ehc # if the name was not in the cache | (formail -rA”Precedence: junk” -A”X-Loop: bic-user@bic.mni.mcgill.ca” ; cat $HOME/.vacation.msg; echo “— “; cat $HOME/.sig ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
(:sourceend:)