John Haxby wrote:
The problem with vacation is that it needs the machine that's running it to
be turned on and running while you're away; this may not be a problem for a
desktop machine or an account on a server but it's a little limited for a
laptop. This may not affect you, but it's possibly why vacation is
considered "old".
Depends on how your email is set up - works fine if vacation is run on a
mail server ... which is the way I use it.
Another potential problem is that vacation didn't used to take into account
whether you were listed in the recipient list in the message header. There
are a _few_ things that are more annoying that 20+ out-of-office replies
when you send a message to a list :-)
Not with the version of vacation I use - the man page explicitly states:
No message is sent if the `To:' or the `Cc:' line does not
list the user to whom the original message was sent or one
of a number of aliases for them
It also attempts to check if the posting has come from a mail list
(using various list related header fields).
i.e. vacation is _much_ better in this regard compared to the
'out-of-office' reply from a well known enterprise mail system :-)
Finally, vacation may not work at all. It requires (or used to require, I
haven't checked for a few years) your mail to be delivered to the machine it
is running on. It integrates well with sendmail and local mail drops, but
is pretty poor otherwise. If you're using dovecot this may well affect you.
True - it does depend on what your email service is - vacation was
written years before modern email services existed - but it does work
well in a 'traditional' Unix email setup.
Finally, the modern replacement is an action performed by the mail server.
A lot of mail servers have something that you can use with varying degrees
of accessibility. Often its a web page (google mail for example) and
sometimes the web interface to mail will do the trick (Zimbra, I think, and
Outlook Web Access let you set up out-of-office messages). Sometimes you
have to use a client that can say the right things to the server.
Given that vacation has been around for years, it is a pity that (some)
more modern email systems can't do out-of-office correctly ...
James Pearson
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