[Dovecot] considering dovecot

[Mark E. Mallett]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 08:30:22AM -0500, John Peacock wrote:
> Rick Hazey wrote:
> > 2) capability for users to set their own vacation message via a web page
> > 
> > Sieve can do both but for #2 it appears that the vacation message text
> > must be contained within the Sieve script itself. I'm planning on using
> > mySQL for the authentication database and the vacation message should be
> > stored in mySQL. I don't see any way to access the vacation message text
> > from mySQL using Sieve.

Possibly one could use a wrapper to get the message from SQL.  Then
again, if you have the code, you can add something to query a database.
My own MDA (which I haven't plugged here lately :) but which I do use
with dovecot) supports reading the text from a .cdb file, but since I am
not a mySQL user, and haven't been asked by any mySQL users, I haven't
added the capability for that kind of lookup.  I imagine it would be
pretty straightforward, though.


> Properly handling vacation messages is beyond the current capabilities of SIEVE,
> IMNSHO.  The problem is that it is surprisingly tricky to correctly figure out
> what messages *not* to reply to: listserv messages, bounces, etc.

Really?  Looking at
    http://untroubled.org/qmail-autoresponder/procedure.txt
(which you mentioned later on) I would say that this is a subset of the
requirements for Sieve's vacation facility.  See
   http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sieve-vacation-06.txt
section 4.6, among others.  What am I missing?


> Indeed, there
> is no way in the SIEVE language to limit the vacation messages by number either;
> it is considered best practices to only respond with the vacation message a
> limited number of times (configurable).

What do you mean?  The big point of the vacation verb in Sieve is to do
exactly that; the responses are throttled to once per sender per interval,
where interval is specified in days.  Maybe you mean something else
by "limit the vacation messages by number?"

mm