If you use procmail to filter messages, setup vacation email response via your /home/USER/.procmailrc rather than the vacation program.
This is because email responses will not then be sent to senders whose emails are to be filtered, which is desirable because the sender doesn’t get to know that the email address was successful. Spammers use such replies to build databases of live email addresses.
Configure procmail as follows:
- Add this to the end of your
/home/USER/.procmailrc:
# Uncomment this line when you go away to send a message
# you have saved as $HOME/.procmail/vacation.msg
#INCLUDERC=$HOME/.procmail/rc.vacation
- The file
$HOME/.procmail/rc.vacationis available “here”. Replace the three occurences ofUSER@DOMAINin this file with your email address.
You are now ready. In order to setup a vacation email response each time you go away, do the following:
- Edit your vacation message
$HOME/.procmail/vacation.msgas appropriate. This file may not contain any variables such as$SUBJECTor$DATE. It should be text only. - Uncomment this line in your
$HOME/.procmailrc file:
#INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/rc.vacation - Remove the file
$HOME./vacation.cache if it exists.
Hi James,
I’m still having trouble. I definitely only use text and I uncommented, however still no workie workie. Please help???
Matt
Comment by Panama Vacation — April 7, 2007 @ 6:39 am
[...] is a good howto for setting up the vacation script using [...]
Pingback by Under African Skies! » Blog Archive » Vacation script using Procmail — July 9, 2007 @ 2:13 pm
Does this recipe assume that the vacation program is installed? As in it’s hoping to use an existing BSD as the cache database…or does it just create it’s own cache?
Comment by John Bailo — July 31, 2007 @ 12:27 pm