Vacation auto-reply on ACS Unix systems

For accounts hosted on ACT (formerly Network Operations) go to popmail.ucsd.edu
For Unix accounts on ACS student systems and sdcc12 read onward.

The "vacation" utility on ACS Unix systems helps you set up procmail to automatically respond to e-mail messages while you are away.

To start the vacation program, simply type vacation at the unix prompt. You should then get a menu which looks like the following: 

	Would you like to:
	1) enable vacation (generate procmail recipe)
	2) disable vacation (backup and remove procmail recipe)
	3) quit (don't touch anything)
Vacation is enabled simply by the presence of a procmail recipe and disabled simply be removing that recipe. To start using vacation, select option 1 from the menu.

Vacation will first ask you to create a vacation message to send to everyone. It will use the Pico editor to allow you to create this and saves the file to vacation.msg. After you are satisfied with the message, you can move on to the next step.

Finally, vacation will ask you to make a decision on whether you want people to receive multiple messages about you being away. If you choose option 2, any time someone sends you an e-mail, they will get the message that says you are on vacation, even if they just sent a message earlier that day. If you choose option 1, every time someone sends you an e-mail, it will store their username in a vacation.cache file. Then next time someone sends you an e-mail, it will check the vacation.cache file to see if they have already gotten an e-mail from you. If they have, it will not send them another.

Depending on the choices you have made, vacation will then create a .procmailrc file in your home directory. This file is what enables the vacation message to be sent out. You can ignore this file and allow vacation to create/delete it as needed, or if you are familiar with procmail, you can edit the file to suit your own needs.

Removing vacation

To remove a vacation message, simply remove/rename the .procmailrc file or run "vacation" again and select option #2. This does the same thing.

What happened to the normal vacation

The normal version of vacation has been replaced for security reasons. The version found on the ACS systems is a perl script which creates a procmailrc file to do the same thing. The presence of the .procmailrc file tells procmail to run and execute the commands in the file every time a message is received to the account.