spear@ihopb.UUCP (Steven Spearman) (07/24/84)
I have at times seen mention of mail demons which will do some processing (like send a reply) on one's incoming mail. This sounds very useful for vacations, etc.. Does anyone have a Unix demon they would be willing to share? I would appreciate a copy. Also, since there may be further interest, would you be willing to have it posted to the net? Thanks, -- Steve Spearman ihnp4!ihopb!spear
rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (08/01/84)
>I have at times seen mention of mail demons which will do some >processing (like send a reply) on one's incoming mail. This sounds >very useful for vacations, etc.. Uh, nice, but have you seen the apocryphal story about someone sending a colleague a piece of mail just before turning on the vacation-mode-mail- answerer and leaving for vacation? Seems he sent that piece of mail to someone who also had the vacation-mode-mail-answerer enabled...and the obvious happened. -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Keep your day job 'til your night job pays.
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (08/08/84)
4.2BSD comes with a grab bag of goodies in the "sendmail" source subdirectory
"aux"; these include
"syslog" - no, the binary may be in /etc but the source isn't in
/usr/src/etc
"logger" - reads from its standard input, or a file, until EOF
and sends each line as a message to "syslog". Sounds
*very* suspiciously like it's intended to read from a
pseudo-device that hands you kernel "printf"s...
a BBN TCP/IP version of "daemon.c"
various other stuff
and
"vacation" - a program intended to send out "I'm on vacation"
notices to people who mail to you, and which maintains a database
of people it's sent those messages to, in order to prevent that
very occurrence (two vacation daemons telling each other "sorry,
I can't tell him you're on vacation because he's on vacation").
The manual page:
.TH VACATION 1
.\" @(#)vacation.1 4.1 7/25/83
.SH NAME
vacation \- return ``I am on vacation'' indication
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B vacation
.B \-I
.br
.B vacation
[
.BI \-t N
]
user
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Vacation
returns a message to the sender of a message
telling that you are on vacation.
The intended use is in a
.I \&.forward
file.
For example,
your
.I \&.forward
file might have:
.PP
.ti +5
\eeric, "|vacation eric"
.PP
which would send messages to you
(assuming your login name was eric)
and send a message back to the sender.
.PP
.I Vacation
expects a file
.I \&.vacation.msg
in your home directory containing a message to be sent back
to each sender.
For example, it might say:
.PP
.in +5
.nf
I am on vacation until July 22. If you have something urgent,
please contact Joe Kalash (IngVAX:kalash).
--eric
.fi
.in -5
.PP
This message will only be sent once a week to each unique
sender.
This timeout can be reset using the
.B \-t
flag;
a trailing `s', `m', `h', `d', or `w'
scales the number to seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks
respectively.
The people who have sent you messages are kept in the files
.I \&.vacation.pag
and
.I \&.vacation.dir
in your home directory.
The
.B \-I
option initializes these files,
and should be executed before you modify your
.I \&.forward
file.
.PP
If the
.B \-I
flag is not specified,
.I vacation
reads the first line from the standard input
for a \s-1UNIX\s0-style
``From'' line
to determine the sender.
If this is not present,
a nasty diagnostic is produced.
.IR Sendmail (8)
includes this automatically.
.SH SEE\ ALSO
sendmail(8)
We've never brought it up, so I make no claim that it works or doesn't work.
(We also got some additional stuff - from Mark Horton, I believe - for
the "aux" directory: a "daemon.c" for UNET - it now runs happily on our
systems running System III with UNET - and mail routing programs which use the
"pathalias" data base.)
Guy Harris
{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy