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vacation_messages_setup

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Vacation messages setup

You can setup a vacation message while you are away from your email in several way. The most simple method is email yourself a specific message (see below). This may, however, be not so simple if you tend to use HTML formatted email or use an exotic program such as Outlook. For such occasions the webmail utility provides a nice feature (also see below). As a last resort you can always us the Linux specific procmail utiltity, which for all STRW accounts has been setup for you already (see last section below).


Email yourself

Turn on auto reply

To turn on the “vacation” message, send yourself an e-mail with subject: vacation on. The message body will become the message sent to others when they mail you. Be sure to send the mail from your local strw account, otherwise it will not get processed (we don't want that others can turn this feature on or off for you!)

Turn off auto reply

To turn the “vacation” feature off, send yourself a message with subject: vacation off


Use Roundcube Webmail

The Observatory provide a WEB mail facility that allows to to read and write email from your STRW account using a standard browser. The tool providing this facility is based on the open source package Roundcube. This package as sevelar pluging, one of which is the vacation plugin. You can access this pluging by selecting the Settings option (top right). Once selected you are presented a window with tabs, one of which is the Vacation Tab:

Click on the Vacation tab and (after some time) you are presented the vacation form:

If you did not yet set a vacation message, a default text is filled in for you to modify. Then select the checkbox 'Enable vacation message' and click on the Save button. Now this text is put into your vacation message file and from this point on people who send you an email will get this text in reply.

If you have a vacation message setup previously, you will see the text from that vacation message in the form. You now have two options,

  • modify the text, tick the checkbox and click Save to update your message text, or
  • leave the checkbox unchecked and click Save to remove the vacation message and thus disabling the vacation messaging system

Procmail Alternative

Vacation messages are setup at the mail server using the procmail program facilities.

The use of the 'vacation' program is not always a good idea. It causes spam bounces to the local postmaster (who probably has better things to do than reading spam addressed to you) and in the worst case, it confirms the validity of your e-mail address to the spammer, which makes your address so much more valuable to him. So if you don't want to be burried in spam when you come back from your trip, don't use 'vacation', but use this vacation-like setup (from procmailex man page, modified for local settings)

Additional note: as of Fedora Core 1(?), the vacation program is no longer distributed with the mail server setup, probably because of these same reasons. All the more reason to use an alternative like this.

Below you find the lines (that may be commented out in your .procmailrc file) which have to be the .procmailrc file to make procmail perform the same actions as the vacation program, excluding the problems mentioned above. If you don't have a .procmailrc file, or an older one without these additions, run SfinxUpdate .procmailrc to install a procmail setup on your account.

vacation_messages_setup.1530619277.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/07/03 12:01 by deul