Score:0

How do I make vacation autoresponding work for aliases?

cn flag

We have an e-mail server on Ubuntu 18.04 running Postfix and Dovecot. How can I make vacation autoresponding work for our user's aliases?

Example: Say our Deputy Librarian is [email protected] and that's also their user and e-mail account on the system, the one I sudo su theirname to in order to run the vacation program. But they also have an alias in /etc/aliases called deplib, so that e-mails sent to [email protected] also get to them.

I have tried invoking vacation with -a deplib and then -a [email protected] but neither worked. Only e-mails sent to theirname get the autoreply.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. I find e-mail administration to be somewhat over my head!

Score:0
cn flag

Ok, I found a way to make it work.

It could be that when I run 'vacation' and it asks me the questions like 'would you like to edit (the vacation message)', that this isn't the vacation program proper.

What I had to do was, after enabling the vacation program for them, edit their .forward file to be as follows, tacking on the -a deplib:

\theirname, "|/usr/bin/vacation theirname -a deplib"

I also removed .vacation.db so I could try again from the same external e-mails and rebooted the server. I was finally able to get autoresponses for both theirname and deblib (separately through two separate external e-mail services).

The problem with this method, though, is that each and every alias has to be manually specified. In this particular case it's not a huge screaming deal, because most of our users that want vacation autoresponders only have a single alias in routine use, or none. But this works for now.

mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.