kevinc@bearcat.lim.tek.COM (Kevin Cosgrove 627-5212) (02/23/88)
John, > I just sent mail to someone and got a (generic) reply immediately. > When I did a finger on the person, I noticed they hadn't logged on > since yesterday. > > She is on vacation (so I can't ask her how she did it). > > Does anyone know how to set up an account to automatically send a reply > without having to log on? > > John L Bergquist > > ->bard ->c164-2ag > ucbvax->zooey ->c162-ba > ->franny ->c8-rd > ->seymour->c9d-af It sounds like you have 'vacation' installed on your system. What 'vacation' does is send the mail on to the mail spool while sending notification of the recipient's absence to the originator. It's great for when one leaves town and can't get to their mail right away. If yours works like ours, then an entry of the following in your ~/.forward file will work fine -- of course you'll have to change the "kevinc" to your login name. \kevinc, "|vacation kevinc" If that doesn't work, you might try consulting the manual pages for 'mhook' and 'vacation'. I haven't had to resort the 'mhook' approach since the 'vacation' scheme works so well for me. _____________________________________________________________________________ Kevin Cosgrove Tektronix, Inc. 11K Plug-Ins Project Leader PO Box 500, M/S 47-092 LIM Product Test Engineering Beaverton, OR 97077 kevinc@bearcat.LIM.TEK.COM (503)-627-5212 _____________________________________________________________________________
Ed@MEAD.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM (Ed Schwalenberg) (02/24/88)
Date: 22 Feb 88 12:08:20 PST (Mon)
From: Kevin Cosgrove 627-5212 <kevinc@bearcat.lim.tek.com>
John,
> I just sent mail to someone and got a (generic) reply immediately.
> When I did a finger on the person, I noticed they hadn't logged on
> since yesterday.
>
> She is on vacation (so I can't ask her how she did it).
>
> Does anyone know how to set up an account to automatically send a reply
> without having to log on?
>
> John L Bergquist
>
> ->bard ->c164-2ag
> ucbvax->zooey ->c162-ba
> ->franny ->c8-rd
> ->seymour->c9d-af
It sounds like you have 'vacation' installed on your system. What 'vacation'
does is send the mail on to the mail spool while sending notification of
the recipient's absence to the originator. It's great for when one leaves
town and can't get to their mail right away.
If yours works like ours, then an entry of the following in your ~/.forward
file will work fine -- of course you'll have to change the "kevinc" to your
login name.
\kevinc, "|vacation kevinc"
If that doesn't work, you might try consulting the manual pages for 'mhook'
and 'vacation'. I haven't had to resort the 'mhook' approach since
the 'vacation' scheme works so well for me.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Kevin Cosgrove Tektronix, Inc.
11K Plug-Ins Project Leader PO Box 500, M/S 47-092
LIM Product Test Engineering Beaverton, OR 97077
kevinc@bearcat.LIM.TEK.COM (503)-627-5212
_____________________________________________________________________________
Before doing this, of course, remove your name from mailing lists such
as UNIX-WIZARDS. A random contributor to mailing lists is not particularly
interested in the information that J. Random Hacker is in Disney World
until Thursday, but you can call his mother at 1-800-555-1212.ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) (02/24/88)
|Before doing this, of course, remove your name from mailing lists such |as UNIX-WIZARDS. A random contributor to mailing lists is not particularly |interested in the information that J. Random Hacker is in Disney World |until Thursday, but you can call his mother at 1-800-555-1212. This is usually not practical due to the lead time of mailing lists. A better way is to stick the mailing list address into your database of people who have already mailed so no further replies will be generated. How this is done is an exercise left to the reader. Unfortunately this won't work if the mailing list doesn't rewrite the header. As a ex mailing list maintainer, I find such replies less upsetting than bounced mail. There should be a special place in net hell for people who go away without cancelling their mailing list subscriptions. Then again, I shouldn't be so harsh. There are some lists I haven't heard a peep from in months and have no idea whether they are alive and whether I'm still on. Even if I do get something from the list, usually there isn't a moderator to see my cancel request. Ken
Douglis@sloth.Berkeley.EDU (Fred Douglis) (02/29/88)
Regarding having the "vacation" program sending replies to mailing lists, it's quite easy to change it to look for the user's name in the "to:" or "cc:" fields and thereby not reply to mail to mailing lists. The latest version of vacation at Berkeley (where I believe it was originally written) has such a modification. Please don't contact me about sending a copy, but assuming it's public domain, I'll try to have a copy posted to alt.sources with a cross-reference to comp.mail.mh. ============ =========================== ============== Fred Douglis douglis@ginger.Berkeley.EDU ucbvax!douglis ============ =========================== ==============