vacation(1)

DESCRIPTION

The vacation program 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 in $HOME. For example, your .forward file might contain:

which would send messages to you (assuming your login name was eric) and reply to any messages for eric or allman. The \ preceding eric is required to force direct delivery to eric's mailbox and prevent an infinite loop through the .forward file. The double quotes are needed to tell sendmail(1M) to treat the enclosed as a unit, rather than separate recipients. It is also important to specify the full path for the vacation program, and there must be no white space between the | character and the start of the path name.

No message is sent unless login or an alias supplied using the -a option is a substring of either the To: or Cc: headers of the mail. No messages from ???-REQUEST, Postmaster, UUCP, MAILER, or MAILER-DAEMON are replied to, nor is a notification sent if a Precedence: bulk or Precedence: junk line is included in the mail headers. Only one message per week is sent to each unique sender (at each unique host system). The people who have sent you messages are recorded in a database in the files .vacation.pag and .vacation.dir in your home directory.

The vacation program 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 say:

Header lines in this file must be left-aligned and must not be preceded by any other lines, including blank lines (see sendmail(1M)). If there is no .vacation.msg file, vacation uses the following file (if it exists):

Otherwise, it logs an error.

vacation reads the first line from the standard input (the incoming mail message in the example .forward file above) for a UNIX style From line to determine the sender. sendmail(1M) includes this From line automatically, and its absence indicates non-mail input.

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

DIAGNOSTICS

On error, vacation exits with a value from <sysexits.h> and causes sendmail to report an error back to the sender of the original message. Errors such as the absence of .vacation.msg or calling vacation with incorrect arguments, are logged using syslogd on the system where vacation actually runs (see syslogd(1M)). The syslog file (/var/adm/syslog/mail.log by default; see /etc/syslog.conf and syslogd(1M) for customizations) should be inspected when vacation generates mailer error messages.

Remember that if the machine is configured for shared mail, inbound mail is handled at the mail server rather than on mail client nodes. This means that syslog diagnostics appear in the mail server's syslog, not the client's syslog.

WARNINGS

Errors in the .forward file can lead to loss of mail and infinite mail loops.

Always send test mail to yourself after configuring vacation to be sure that it is working properly. This is akin to checking telephone forwarding before leaving for an extended period, and can prevent loss of messages.

Some mail recipients look for an RFC 822 compliant To: header in their incoming mail messages. Such recipients have to set the option NoRecipientAction to add_to in the sendmail configuration file, sendmail.cf.

AUTHOR

vacation was developed by Eric Allman and the University of California, Berkeley.

FILES

SEE ALSO

sendmail(1M), syslogd(1M), ndbm(3X).