On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Neal Becker wrote:
> 1) I just read "simplified vacation processing". I don't understand
> it. It says, "A local part prefix suach as 'vacation-' can be
> specifed on a director ..." What exactly does that mean?
It means setting the option
prefix = "vacation-"
on a director, which constrains it to acting only on local parts that
start "vacation-".
> "...message to be delivered directly to the vacation program, or
> uses Exim's autoreply transport." What determines which one?
The configuration. For example, you might have
vacation_director:
driver = smartuser,
prefix = "vacation-",
transport = vacation_transport;
which would catch all local parts starting with "vacation-" (but no
others) and pass them on to
vacation_transport:
driver = pipe;
command = "/usr/bin/vacation ${local_part}"
or instead you could have something like
vacation_transport:
driver = autoreply;
text = "$local_part is on vacation",
file = /home/$local_part/.vacation.msg,
file_optional
With a configuration like this, all the user has to do is to put
user, vacation-user
in a .forward file to turn it on. Alternatively, you could use
require_files to trigger the whole thing on the existence of a file
called .vacation.msg in the user's home directory.
> 2) I asked on this list before about handling of accounts for persons
> who have left. I got lots of interesting responses. It looks to
> me that most people are not using a vacation program, but just a
> shell script that returns a message. Am I the only one paranoid
> about mail loops?
We cause mail for such people to be piped to the following script
#! /bin/sh
cat <<End
Your mail to $LOCAL_PART@$DOMAIN was not delivered because that user no
longer has an account on this system.
End
from a pipe transport that has "return_output" set. This causes the
message to go back as a delivery error message, which should not cause a
mail loop (but I'm increasingly seeing automatic replies to such things
from systems that ignore the RFCs).
> exim-release request: Before release, can we try to collect some more
> examples of configurations? I think new exim admins will find it a
> whole lot easier to see some examples than to pour over the manual.
I think "release" is a nebulous concept. In some sense it has already
happened. However, I'm all in favour of collecting configurations, but I
don't think I have time myself. I'll be happy to include them in future
distributions if people will care to contribute. I might also be tempted
to criticize. :-))
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
