The BSD Vacation V2 Project

General Information

I've almost entirely 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 to which 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 other enhancements and many, 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 and address syntax, i.e. how header lines can be flowed to multiple lines with leading whitespace, etc.; and how addresses are formed using mailbox names, domain names, display names, optional routes, etc.
• does not expect message input to have Unix mailbox headers -- only proper RFC 2822 headers are used.
• replies to your messages just as you would with any mailer program you use, sending a message derived from a template file you supply to it.
• 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.
• allows the user to specify alternate pathnames for the recent correspondents database.
• automatically detects the most common mailing list and autoresponder mechanisms and avoids responding to them.
• it has good built-in debugging support.

Release Information

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.planix.com/pub/local/vacation-2.0.tar.gz .

The current release distribution is just the BSD source. It should be reasonably portable to any modern POSIX(2001)-compatible Unix-like system. I believe it needs only a NetBSD-compatible asprintf(3), a 4.4BSD-compaible fgetln(3), and a BSD-compatible db(3) over and above what's available in most standard Unix/POSIX libraries.

User 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

Make it easier to specify recipient addresses, including wildcard or RE matching. This probably means adding support for a default flat-file list of aliases, such as ~/.vacation.aliases. Possibly also multiple ``login'' parameters could be allowed as well, and they could be full addresses too, effectively deprecating the need for `-a'.

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.

Provide better conformance to RFC 3834 (Automatic E-mail Responses).

Make it easier to initialize a default template message.

These and other ideas are better documented in the ToDo file which accompanies the distribution.

Patches and bug reports always welcome! See the contact address below!

History

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

The 2.0 release used a half-baked RFC-822 header reader borrowed from the BSD Mail program, and it parsed out mailbox names from recipient headers using very basic string comparison tricks, which sometimes worked. More recent releases include a from-scratch, complete, RFC 2822 header and address parser which has been well tested and which is known to accept all valid address list syntax.