VACATION(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual VACATION(1)
NAME
vacation - provide absence notification when receiving email
SYNOPSIS
vacation -i [-r interval]
vacation [-a alias] login
DESCRIPTION
vacation returns a message to the sender of a message telling them that
you are currently not reading your mail. The intended use is in a
.forward file. For example, your .forward file might have:
\eric, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a allman eric"
which would send messages to you (assuming your login name was eric) and
reply to any messages for "eric" or "allman".
The options are as follows:
-a alias
Handle messages for alias in the same manner as those received
for the user's login name.
-i Initialize the vacation database files. It should be used before
you modify your .forward file.
-r interval
Set the reply interval to interval days. The default is one
week. An interval of "0" or "infinite" (actually, any non-
numeric character) will never send more than one reply.
Messages will not be replied to if any of the following conditions are
true:
- Message are not "To:" or "Cc:" a valid login (or alias supplied
using the -a option).
- Messages are from "???-REQUEST", "Postmaster", "UUCP",
"MAILER", or "MAILER-DAEMON" (where these strings are case
insensitive).
- A "Precedence: bulk", "Precedence: list", or "Precedence: junk"
line is included in the mail headers.
- An "Auto-Submitted" line is included in the mail headers with a
value of anything but "no".
- A "List-Id" line (with any value) is included in the mail
headers.
The people who have sent you messages are maintained as a Berkeley DB
database in the file .vacation.db in your home directory.
vacation expects a file .vacation.msg, in your home directory, containing
a message to be sent back to each sender. It should be an entire message
(including headers). For example, it might contain:
From:
[email protected] (Eric Allman)
Subject: I am on vacation
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk
I am on vacation until July 22.
If you have something urgent,
please contact Keith Bostic <
[email protected]>.
--eric
Any occurrence of the string $SUBJECT in .vacation.msg will be replaced
by the subject of the message that triggered the vacation program.
vacation reads the incoming message from standard input, checking the
message headers for either the UNIX "From" line or a "Return-Path" header
to determine the sender. If both are present, the sender from the
"Return-Path" header is used.
Fatal errors, such as calling vacation with incorrect arguments, or with
non-existent logins, are logged in the system log file, using syslog(3).
FILES
~/.vacation.db database file
~/.vacation.msg message to send
SEE ALSO
dbopen(3), syslog(3), smtpd(8)
HISTORY
The vacation command appeared in 4.3BSD.
FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8 March 31, 2022 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8