Freebsd Built-in vacation program does not auto reply

[Steve Bertrand]

Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 6:00 AM, lyd mc <alydiomc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> Why Freebsd built-in vacation program (/usr/bin/vacation) does not auto
>> reply?
>>
>> I am using fresh installed Freebsd7.0 and 7.1. here is my configs.
>>
>> Under the home directory of the user (alydio.mc)
>>
>> .forward
>>     \alydio.mc, "|/usr/bin/vacation alydio.mc"
>>
>> .vacation.msg
>>    Subject: On vacation message
>>    From: alydio.mc at mydomain.com
>>    I'm on vacation and will not be reading my mail for a while.
>>   Your mail will be dealt with when I return.
>> .
>> from postfix/sendmail logs:
>>
>> ...sniff
>>  (delivered to command: /usr/bin/vacation alydio.mc)
>>
>> after this nothing will happened... no errors.... no warnings...
>>
>> However the one I installed from ports (/usr/local/bin/vacation) works
>> fine.
>>
>>
>> I want to use the freebsd base vacation program.
> 
> 
> Did you read the man page fully and understand it?
> Did you initialize the vacation database?
> Have you tried to run it in debug mode?
> Try RTFM again and see if you could figure out the problem yourself.

Wow... wait a sec...

I recall years ago having to deal with 'vacation' messages along with
sendmail, and with thousands of users, I hated doing it manually.
Perhaps a ``how I do it'' is warranted here.

It is quite apparent that the OP has RTFM, _and_ tried to work it out
for himself...

Off the top of my head, here is what I had to do to create a vacation
message. Perhaps sendmail folk could help me out here:

Run the following command to initialize the vacation db:

# vacation -i

...now, put your content into a file called ".vacation.msg" in the
user's home directory. The data could resemble something like this:

From: my at email.address (Steve Bertrand)
Subject: Out of office
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk

I will be out of the office for the rest of my life. Contact someone who
cares until I decide I come back.

...then, in a file named ".forward" within the users home directory, put:

\username, "| /path/to/vacation username"

...as far as I recall, this should kick the vacation program into gear.

Steve