Maintain Vacation replies

Vacation allows for an autoreply email to be sent to every sender of every email received. The sender only gets one vacation autoreply message, even if multiple messages are sent. Emails coming from nefarious sources will also be sent an email.

Vacation needs to be manually activated and deactivated.

If procmail is being used in the ~/.forward file, you have to use the setup shown at the "Using with Vacation" section.

Enable Vacation

Log in to a CSEE UNIX system.

Edit ~/.vacation.msg and write your autoreply message. Full email headers need to be included in the message (full headers, blank line, and then message body). Here is an example:

From: johndoe@cs.umbc.edu (John Doe)
Subject: I am on vacation

I am on vacation until July 22.  If you have something urgent,
please contact Jane Doe <janedoe@cs.umbc.edu>.
--john

Initialize your vacation database with

vacation -i

Edit ~/.forward and make sure it only contains the following, replacing each username with your username

\username, "|/usr/bin/vacation username"

Disable Vacation

Either delete ~/.forward or return the .forward contents to what it was before changing it when enabling Vacation.