Beginning with V8.12 sendmail, you can list the senders contained in the vacation program's database. Every time you receive a mail message from someone, that individual's mail address is looked up in the vacation program's database. If the address if found, and if the date associated with it is zero or if it is newer than the timeout interval, no vacation message is sent. If the address is found, and if the date associated with it is older than the timeout interval, a vacation message is sent and the date for that address's record is updated to the present. If the address is absent from the database, a vacation message is sent and that address is added to the database and is given the present time.

The -l command-line switch causes vacation to print a list of the sender addresses it has in its database, one address per line, in the following format:

address                         date

The address is the sender address that received the message, or an address preset with the -x command-line switch. The date is when the message was last sent, or, for -x addresses, either a zero (which displays as Wed Dec 31 17:00:00 1969) prior to V8.12.4, or a literal (exclusion) for V8.12.4 and above:

friend@remote.site.com                 Fri Mar  1 15:10:48 2002
buddy@another.com                      Wed Dec 31 17:00:00 1969   V8.12.3 and before
buddy@another.com                      (exclusion)            V8.12.4 and above

The first line shows a sender who recently received a vacation message. The second line shows a sender address that was put in the database with the -x command line.

Note that this -l command-line switch only shows sender information from the database. Other information, such as the timeout interval, is not printed with this switch.