Hi,
(IMO Vacation messages aren't really part of this mailing list forum, as I belive it's a MTA's job)
I have had Vacation Messages implemtented for a few years now using Exim & MySQL with a Squirelmail plugin I wrote. Users would login to their webmail profile, using the plugin, add, edit or delete their vacation message which is stored in a MySQL DB.
On successful delivery of the mail through the MTA, Exim would check to see if the user has set a message in the vacation database (MySQL), and if so, respond to the sender with the body of custom text. This would only happen once per sender per day (predefined period I decided on). So If you ended up mailing the user 10 mails, you would only receive one message back informing you the recipient is "on vacation". One can set a global exclude list of addresses not to reply to, ie postmaster etc, but undoubtably some will get through.
I have plans to implement a time/date schedule for the vacation messages as well, so that users can pre-book a vacation message for a particular duration ahead of time.
So.. To some it up. I prefer using Exim (MTA) to do the dirty work.
Regards Richard
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.
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. 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).
Personally (and professionally) I use qmail-autoresponder:
http://untroubled.org/qmail-autoresponder/which, despite its name, isn't just limited to qmail, but can be placed in a .forward file.
HTH
John
-- John Peacock Director of Information Research and Technology Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Blvd Suite H Lanham, MD 20706 301-459-3366 x.5010 fax 301-429-5747