The BSD Vacation V2 Project

General Information

I've re-written the vacation program that originally came with Sendmail. My new version tries much harder to be a proper Mail User Agent as defined by RFC 2822. It replies as to your mail as you would, and keeps a little database of recent correspondents it has sent a reply to so that it can avoid sending multiple annoying replies to every message someone sends to you, resending a new reply only every week or so. It also avoids sending replies to mailing list mail, bounces of your own mail, etc. This version has many enhancements and many bug fixes over the original.

Description

vacation replies to your personal e-mail on your behalf while you are away on vacation. You simply write a template message to be sent to your correspondents and arrange to have copies of your incoming e-mail piped to this program.

Features

So, just what does this vacation have to offer? Here's a list of some of the most interesting features:

• understands full RFC 2822 header syntax, i.e. how header lines can be flowed to multiple lines with leading whitespace, etc. (but it does not yet understand the full address syntax -- Fixed in the Next Release!).
• replies to your messages just as you would with your mailer, sending message derived from a template file.
• will replace the string ``$SUBJECT'' in your template message with the contents of the ``Subject:'' header from the incoming message.
• allows the user to specify the name of the template message file, or uses a default filename.
• only replies to messages addressed explicitly to your mailbox.
• can be told about multiple aliases for your mailbox.
• keeps a list of addresses it has sent e-mail to recently and does not reply to the same address again until some specified interval of time has passed (defaulting to one week).
• the recent correspondents database can be pre-loaded manually. (Note that currently the entries supplied must exactly match the ``Reply-To:'' header contents (or if there is none then the contents of the ``From:'' header) expected in your incomding messages.)
• allows the user to specify the name of the recent correspondents database file, or uses a default filename.
• automatically detects the most common mailing list and autoresponder mechanisms and avoids responding to them.
• it has good debugging support.

As of the last time this web page was updated the current release was: 2.0.

The most recent release is always available as ftp://ftp.weird.com/pub/local/vacation.tar.gz .

Documentation

You can read the vacation manual page online.

FreshMeat.net Reference

My version of vacation is listed on FreshMeat.net at http://freshmeat.net/projects/vacation-v2/

Future Plans

The current release distribution is just the BSD source. It should be reasonably portable to any modern POSIX-compatible Unix-like system. I believe it needs only fgetln(3) and db(3) over and above what's available in standard Unix libraries.

Properly handle Resent-To: and Resent-CC: headers (mostly already done in the unreleased source).

Fix the way corresponent addresses are stored. I need to parse full RFC-2822 address headers to do this though, and then store each individual correspondent's address without comments, etc. Only then will the preloaded "@domain" exclusions always work.

Add a command-line option to allow the user to specify a (list of) header fields (body and/or contents, substring, exact, or RE?) that should be used to mark messages that should not be responded to.

History

The original version of vacation upon which this version is based came from NetBSD.