[Dovecot] Vacation message with Sieve

[Thomas Harold]

On 11/24/2009 6:27 AM, Charles Marcus wrote:
> On 11/23/2009, Patrick Nagel (patrick.nagel at star-group.net) wrote:
>> Yes, that was my first proposal, but that was also rejected harshly by
>> the other project managers. They wanted to have some "transit time" in
>> which the replacement guy would still access the leaving guy's mailbox.
>>
>> They felt that just deactivating the mailbox and rejecting mails would
>> be "rude".
>
> 1. Add an alias to the x-managers account that forwards all incoming
> mail to his replacement, or
>
> 2. Add the x-managers account to your replacements email client, so they
> can check it as well as theirs.

3. (slightly different) Have the vacation auto-reply set and also use 
the sieve redirect method after the vacation message gets processed?

redirect :copy "newmanager at example.com";

New manager gets the email, clients get a "hey, I retired but these 
folks over here will also get a copy of your message and will help you" 
message.

90% sure you can do that (vacation is supposed to be compatible with 
redirect)... I'll have to try it the next time that someone retires 
around here.

Eventually (30-90 days), we turned off the redirect and changed the 
vacation message.

You'll want a very good server-side spam filter with aggressive 
quarantine levels for that user if you're going to have a long-running 
vacation reply in place.  That'll avoid the vacation script replying to 
every joe-jobbed message that makes it into the mailbox.

The sooner that you can start returning 5xx codes for the old address 
the better (IMHO).

(Still doesn't address the issue of more then one per day, but you'd 
have to complain about that to the folks who wrote RFC 5230 who specify 
that :days has to be greater then zero.)