Using vacation

Setup:

To set an away message, log into a unix machine and type vacation. NOTE: If you are using procmail to filter lists and spam you can enable vacation this way, but it is better to do it in the procmailrc, as then it will not respond to every spam. See below for usage. You are using procmail if you have a .procmailrc in your home directory.

The vacation program will bring up either the last vacation message or a generic one in an editor. Change it as desired, and then save and quit.

At this point vacation should be enabled. Send yourself a test message and a response should be generated.

Removal:

On return, disable the auto-response by logging into a unix machine and typing: rm .forward

Tidbits:

To see who sent mail while away type vaclook this looks in the .vacation.db file and reports on all the addresses that sent mail.

If you forward your name.n@osu.edu mail to stat and want vacation to respond to that as well, edit the .forward file and change it from:
  \username, "|/usr/bin/vacation username"
to:
  \username, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a name.n username"
This tells vacation about another alias. Note: leave off @osu.edu from the OSU address.

Using Vacation with Procmail:

You can do the above, however this will respond to every spam and list you filter in procmail. Thus it is better to set up procmail rule to run the vacation program. First, create the vacation files:

1. Edit a .vacation.msg file in your home directory. This will be the body of the away message.

2. Zero vacation's database files:

         vacation -I
       or:
         cp /dev/null ~/.vacation.db
       

3. Edit your .procmailrc, placing the following lines at the end:

       :0 c
       |/usr/bin/vacation -a name.n username
       

   The username, and name.n lines MUST be raplaced with your OSU username, and Stats username for this to work. Note that these are in the default .procmailrc, but commented out. The comment character is a #.

4. As with any changes in procmail, test it by sending yourself a message.

5. On return, simply comment out the lines from point 3.

Note procmail lines are executed in order from top to bottom. Thus, since the vacation lines are added to the end of the .procmailrc, (so that any rules that match above, such as for mailing lists) do not cause a vacation message to be generated.