Hi all
I just ran into a small issue when setting up a vacation message for a client.
I tend to test a variety of messages, layouts, wording. links, etc until a client is happy. With this process it means I run several test emails to the account with vacation message enabled, often several within an hour.
Now the vacation message setup is designed to only send the reply if any of the following conditions are met (from the vacation man page):
- The sender address includes the string -REQUEST@.
- The sender is you.
- The sender's name is any of:
daemon
postmaster
mailer-daemon
mailer
root
- The sender matches any of the mail addresses listed in the optional files ~/.vacation.aliases and
~/.vacation.noreply.
- There is a Precedence: bulk or Precedence: junk header.
- There is a Mailing-List: header.
- Your mail address, or any address you have listed in the optional ~/.vacation.aliases file does not appear
in either the To: or Cc: headers.
- An automatic reply has already been sent to the same address during the last week. The timeout value
may be changed using the -t option.
Now this last item stops me from doing the testing I need so here is how to change this behaviour if you so choose.
The vacation message stuff, once enabled for a user, is driven via that users .qmail file, for example:
| /usr/local/bin/vacation -j <account name>
| /usr/bin/procmail ~/.procmailrc ; if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then exit -1; else exit 99; fi;
./Maildir/
where <account name> is the account for which the vacation message has been enabled.
Now to allow me to do my thing I need to tell the messaging system to allow more frequent sending of the vacation messages, fortunately (by good design) there is a command line switch that allows for this, namely -t.
Now -t accepts a duration value, so if I want the system to send the message after only a 5 second delay it would be -t5s, an 8 hour delay, -t8h, etc
So how to add it to the system ...
We need to modify the templates that write out the .qmail file, the ones we're interested in are:
/etc/e-smith/templates-user/.qmail/49vacationMessage
/etc/e-smith/templates-user/.qmail/74vacationMessage
Now we can edit these templates or copy them to templates-user-custom & edit the copies leaving the originals pristine, a lot better option IMHO, and the SME way.
.. now for some commands to get this done
mkdir /etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom/.qmail
cp /etc/e-smith/templates-user/.qmail/49vacationMessage /etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom/.qmail/49vacationMessage
cp /etc/e-smith/templates-user/.qmail/74vacationMessage /etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom/.qmail/74vacationMessage
cd /etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom/.qmail
If we edit the templates in /etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom/.qmail (I use Midnight Commander, mc -d) we'll notice that each of them has this line:
return "| /usr/local/bin/vacation -j $VacationDelay $USERNAME"
so we need to change this line to add the delay value, for 8 hours we would change the line to:
return "| /usr/local/bin/vacation -j -t8h $VacationDelay $USERNAME"
Once these changes are made to both files the new option is global for all users when the vacation message is enabled; if a user currently has the message enabled you'll need to disable & then re-enable the message to get their .qmail file rewritten.
While I was in test mode I set it to 5 seconds, once finished I left it at 24 hours for this client.
Enjoy.
BTW - once peeps have had a chance to comment & critique I can write this up in the wiki
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