I'm going on holiday tomorrow. (Pauses to whoop gleefully.) This means setting up a holiday auto-responder on my email. Yeah, I know you folks all have your exchange-enabled outlook auto-responder wizard to do this, or your webmail can set it up with a few clicks.

But for us old-fashioned types the thing to use is the vacation program. Originally developed by the near-mythical Eric Allman it's now being developed by Chris Samuel and Brian May. (Of Queen fame? Maybe, maybe not.) Download the source from Chris's site:

http://www.csamuel.org/software/vacation

if your flavour of linux doesn't provide it. (Hint: before it would compile, I had to "yum install gdbm-devel". Your mileage may vary.)

Create a file in proper email format in your home directory, and call it .vacation.msg:

From: you@yourdomain.co.uk (Your Full Name)
Subject: I am on holiday

Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, I am currently on
holiday and so will probably not see (or reply to) your
email until the 18th of October 2010. I will, however,
reply to you then (if your email needs a response).

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards,

Donald I.
Then edit your .forward file. I have a small complication here -- my .forward file is already used in my setup to send my mail to dovecot's "deliver" program (I have a postfix/dovecot/Maildir IMAP mail setup).

Normally, if you have a blank .forward file, you can just run "vacation" with no args and it will automagically create your .forward file for you. It will look like this:

\username, "|/usr/bin/vacation username"

However, my .forward file has to look like this:

| "/usr/libexec/dovecot/deliver", "|/usr/bin/vacation donald_i"
This means the mail is sent to both deliver AND vacation. Good eh? Vacation has various other switches -- read the manpage, it's lucid and very helpful. When you're ready, running

vacation -I

from your shell will kick everything off.

Have a nice break -- and remember to edit your .forward again when you get back!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apple No More?

My trusty Macbook Pro is 8 years old. A bit like the Argo it is arguable if that's entirely true, since the memory has been increased and the HDD has been replaced by an SSD (if you haven't done this I can't emphasis enough how worthwhile an upgrade it is). But the fact remains that it's elderly and things like running an android emulator are getting too much for it. I've been putting off buying a new machine as long as possible though. Gone are the days when I used to lust after the latest model. Apple seem to be deliberately making their machines less appealing to me. This may be age creeping up on me and an accompanying lack of desire to experience new things, but I don't think so (at least, not in this case). Soldered memory and soldered SSD? Memory I can just about cope with; to be honest I don't find a need to use more than 8GB for anything these days. But I get all itchy at the thought of internal storage you can't replace or upgrade. Add to...
Read more

Setting XCode brace options

Just started working with Xcode. I'm old-fashioned and prefer my code blocks to look like this: if (x) { //do something } rather than like this (which is how Xcode defaults to doing things): if (x) { //do something } After a bit of quality time with the big G, I found that this bit of Voodoo (supplied to the Terminal) does the trick: defaults write com.apple.Xcode XCCodeSenseFormattingOptions -dict BlockSeparator "\n" More of these codes are available from Apple's reference docs .
Read more

Delicious Serial

Image
NB Even by the standards of this part-time blog the following post is absurdly obscure. My brother works for a large company who have been in business here since the 1950s. They have a lot of old equipment, and he asked my advice about an elderly PC. It interfaced with some industrial plant and displayed vital statistics about what the machinery was doing. The worry was it might fail one day, and they had no backup or replacement for it. Intrigued, I paid a visit. It turned out to be a Sanyo PC, model number MBC-17LXS. It had a 5.25" floppy disk drive (empty) and interfaced with the plant via a serial cable. The software appeared to be running on DOS, but I couldn't confirm that as they were using the plant that day and didn't want me trying to quit the program. Back home, I did a bit of digging. Not a lot of data on the Sanyo MBC-17LX online but I eventually found this advert in a scanned copy of the August 1990 Popular Electronics magazine: Cool - so the machine was c...
Read more