vacation program and sendmail

[michael1973]

Hi!

I have a huge problem with installing the vacation program. I setup the program with YaST. After that I initialised
the vacation program with vacation -I in the user's home directory. A vacation.db was built. Then I started vacation and a file vacation.msg was created by the program. After that I put the following line in the .forward file:

\gwenn, "|/usr/bin/vacation gwenn"

gwenn is the name of the user and the name of his home
directory as well. All files are readable for all.

Then I tried to send a mail via Outlook, but nothing happenend. My mail hasn't been received by the receipient, but it can be found in the /var/spool/mqueue. I didn't get an auto-reply message.

Has anybody an idea what to try or what to do? I really don't know what's going on...help!



System: Linux SuSE 8.1 as local mailserver with sendmail 8.7 and procmail (looks like it in the sendmail.cf)...

 

[michael1973]

I found out that the mails in the mqueue have been delivered. But still I didn't get a reply message by the vacation program. What's wrong?

 

[michael1973]

alright, finally i got an auto-reply message by the vacation program yesterday.

but there is still one problem left:

the mails that will be sent or delivered have a wrong timestamp. i recognized that the system time was wrong.
i fixed the problem with "date" and "hwclock". then i tested the new time by creating a new file and it got the right timestamp.

now the problem:
the timestamp in local e-mails is still wrong, for ex. 11:00 instead of 12:00. it's a local problem...but why is that so?

any ideas?

 

[michael1973]

Okay, I solved my problems. If somebody is interested in it...ask me

 

[macsebi]

maybe you can write down what you did to make it work. that would help a lot
Thanx,
MacSebi

 

[onepair]

Did ya learn about the -a option for aliases?

 

[macsebi]

yes. I am aware of that... but I am sending to usernames anyway. so that shouldn't make a difference....

 

[michael1973]

Alright, I try to explain how i solved my problem with the vacation program.


1. chmod settings:

"chmod 644" for ".forward" and maybe for the home directory

2. chown:

change owner of the file, for ex. from "nouser" to "gwenn-200"

3. chgrp:

change group, for ex. from "

http://wwwrun"

to "users"

4. edit the .forward:
example entry:

\gwenn-200, "|/usr/bin/vacation –j gwenn-200"

gwenn-200 is the username.


summary of the steps before doing the things above:


first step:

setting up vacation with "vacation -i"

second step:

create a reply message in "vacation.msg"

third step: the entry in ".forward" (see above)

that's all...

some questions that will help you, if vacation doesn't work:

1. Is your home directory owned by you and writable only by you?
2. Is you ".forward" owned by you and writable only by you?

 

[Rhinokiller]

Just as an aside, I have found that using a procmail recipe in a users home directory is a lot easier than using the vacation program. If anyone wants this recipe let me know and I will post it.

Cogito Ergo Sum - Non Compos Mentis

 

[nine97]

Hello Rhinokiller,

Could you post your procmail recipe?

I have successfully use the Vacation rpm on my RH7.3 box for auto-response. However, it requires that the user to have a bash rather than /bin/false (which I used for all of my mail only users). Is it possible to keep the shell as /bin/false and still get the auto-reponse to work? Thanks!

 

[Rhinokiller]

nine97,
Here it is, I stripped it down to its barebones but I left in another recipe I use to strip malicious attachments and send them to a temp dir$ at the bottom.

FORMAIL=/usr/bin/formail
SENDMAIL=/usr/sbin/sendmail
SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILDIR=/var/spool/mail/mail_user

### Vacation Recipe ###
:0 Whc: user.lock
# Check to see if mail was addressed to user
* $^To:.*mail_user
# Don't Reply To Daemons and mailling lists
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^X-Loop: mail_user@mydomain.com
| FORMAIL -rD 8192 user.cache
:0c eh # if the name was not in the cache
| (formail -rI"Precedence: junk" -I "From: Auto Responder <autoresponder@mydomain.com>" ; -A"X-Loop: mail_user@mydomain.com" ; echo

"Your email has been delivered to mail_user , however mail_user will be out of the office until December 8th." ; echo "Thank you.") |

sendmail -oi -t


### Check for multipart header ###
### Strip malicious attahcments and send them to /tmp/filter ###
:0 H
* ^Content-Type: multipart
# check body for executable filenames
{
:0 B
* .*\/name=.*\.(com|bat|exe|mmc|pif|scr|vbs|zip)(")?(\ *|\t*)$
/tmp/filter
}


Cogito Ergo Sum - Non Compos Mentis