vacation

Making vacation autoresponder in Debian

Make the .forward file in user's home directory:

\<a href="mailto:user@email.com">user@email.com</a>
"|/usr/bin/vacation user"

Make the .vacation.msg in user's home directory:

From: <a href="mailto:user@email.com">user@email.com</a> (Joe Bloggs)
Subject: I am on Annual Leave
Delivered-By-The-Graces-Of: The Vacation program
Precedence: bulk
E-mail message goes here

cd out of the user's home directory to /home and run:

Other than following the steps outlined in the INSTALL.txt file of Virtual Vacation’s directory in postfix admin, I had to do these to make it work properly as well:

Added

vacation_destination_recipient_limit = 1

to /etc/postfix/main.cf

At this point things work, so long as your recipient who's on holidays is not a member of any virtual aliases (ie he or she doesn't receive mail sent to generic addresses like info@ or help@).

If they do, you'll soon notice a heap of 'permission denied' errors being spat back either as a bounce or in mail.log, syslog, and the vacation-debug log. This is because the vacation user doesn't have access to select from the alias table in your postfix database.

To fix, you need to grant this privilege to the vacation user with an SQL query:

GRANT SELECT ON TABLE alias TO vacation;

All fixed, now email sent to an alias will send back a vacation auto-reply as well.