[exim] Exim, Vacation and Squirrelmail Out of Office setup.

Hi guys,
Right this one has got me stumped. I have searched the archives, the wiki and the general web and I can't find the right recipe to get this working correctly.

I have two Exim server sites which have said they absolutely must have Out of Office AutoReplies - the users have said that it's so important that they are prepaired to ditch Exim and Squirrelmail and go for MS Exchange - just for Out of Office!
Seemed total overkill to me to go to all the Expence of Exchange when all they want is Out of Office. "I'll fix it" I said. Well that was days ago and I have made progress but can't quite crack it.

1. The system must be controlled by the users which means using the Autorespond plugin via Squirrelmail. There are two plugin options for Squirrelmail one called "Local User Autoresponder and Mail Forwarder" and one called "Autorespond". I've installed both but only the Autorespond one works out of the box so that is what I am using - the other just gives a blank screen. Autorespond required the 'vacation' program so I've installed the BSD port for Linux (http://www.csamuel.org/software/vacation) from source .

When a user turns on 'Auto Replys' in Squirrelmail the Autorespond plugin puts a .forward file in the users home directory containing a pipe vacation command containing the username and any alias. Exim is supposed to then execute this and the vacation command then uses the contents of the vacation.msg file to construct an auto reply email which Exim then sends back to the sender.
The only trouble with this is that it just doesn't work all the sender gets back is a mail delivery failure message saying following:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  pipe to |/usr/bin/vacation  -a bobm
    generated by bob@???
    local delivery failed

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

------ pipe to |/usr/bin/vacation  -a bobm
       generated by bob@??? ------

usage: vacation [ -I ]
or:    vacation [ -j ] [ -a alias ] [ -h hostname ] [ -tN ] [ -r ] login   

This seems to be saying that the vacation command failed. However I can't work out why - the syntax of the .forward file seems OK to me ?

"|/usr/bin/vacation -a bobm"


So I gave up with the vacation command and tried to use Exim's builtin vacation command emulation. So I now have this in my exim.conf file:



# ROUTERS CONFIGURATION

begin routers
...
send_to_smarthost:
...
dnslookup:
...
spam_admin:
...
system_aliases:
...
userforward:
...
procmail:
...
## This router delivers a "vacation" message if a file called 'vacation.msg'
# exists in the users home dir.

uservacation:
  driver = accept
  domains = +local_domains
check_local_user
## user = $local_part
 # User to put message in a file called vacation.msg
  require_files = $home/.vacation.msg
 ## do not reply to errors or lists
  condition =  ${if or { \
               {match {$h_precedence:} {(?i)junk|bulk|list}} \
               {eq {$sender_address} {}} \
               } {no} {yes}}
 no_expn
 # Do not reply to errors or bounces or lists
  senders = ! ^.*-request@.*:\
           ! ^bounce-.*@.*:\
           ! ^.*-bounce@.*:\
           ! ^owner-.*@.*:\
           ! ^postmaster@.*:\
           ! ^webmaster@.*:\
           ! ^listmaster@.*:\
           ! ^mailer-daemon@.*:\
           ! ^root@.*
  transport = uservacation_transport
  unseen
 user = $local_part
  no_verify

localuser:
...
#TRANSPORTS CONFIGURATION

remote_smtp:
...

remote_msa:
...
# This transport is used for vacation messages
#
uservacation_transport:
driver = autoreply
file = $home/.vacation.msg
file_expand
user = $local_part
once = $home/.vacation.db
## to use a flat file instead of a db specify once_file_size
## once_file_size = 2K
once_repeat = 7d
from = $local_part@???
to = $sender_address
subject = "Out of Office AutoReply: $h_subject"

procmail:
...
local_delivery:
...
address_pipe:
...
address_file:
...
address_reply:
...


The above seems to produce an auto reply. I have to bodge the squirrelmail Autorespond so that it writes to a bogus .forward file - called .forward-off just so Exim wont pick it up. But the problem with this setup is that if I send an email to the a user's alias they get a reply from the users actual username - the Autorespond plugin was supposed to fix this by using the -a switch to the vacation command. But I cant seem to be able to do this with Exim's vacation functionality ?

The other (realtively minor) issue is that when the auto reply comes back I get "From: bob@???; on behalf of; bob@???" as the server is on a different domain from the email domain. Is there a way to fix this I wonder ?

If I have to live without the alias reply functionality then I can on one site as they don't use aliases but the other users all use aliases as their email address so - not sure where I go - its all a bit of a bodge really. Once site I can probably get away OK with it but not the other. I guess I'd have to change all their user names to be the same as the alias then delete the aliases from /etc/aliases. But surely there must be a better way ?


Also I mention here that I'm not a programmer and my programming skills are limited to commenting out bits and changing variables - with a general understanding of what the code is doing.


Thanks for any help.

Best regards.
Mike.