[PLUG] vacation utility

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Mon Aug 22 04:21:00 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Doug Carter wrote:
> I'm sorry, I must not have worded my question correctly. Let me try 
> again:
>
> I'm looking for a auto-responding email utility for my users. The 
> "vacation" program was once available and now it's not. I'm looking for 
> an alternative if one is available.
>
> I didn't ask anything about mailing lists, so maybe you've confused my 
> question with a different thread.

Woah!  Look back a bit, buddy.  You asked "What happened to the vacation 
utility?" and Russ offered his opinion as to why he thinks it's no longer 
part of "the standard distribution" (another of your laments).  The 
request for an alternative was the last sentence of your post.

If you ask what to use, you're going to get opinions that include 
"nothing" (usually with an explanation as to why).  Russ's response was 
completely appropriate for your original post.  No confusion on his part.

On Debian (both stable and unstable -- I tried my mail server as well, I 
get this:

jbrelin at person:~$ apt-cache search vacation
bsdmainutils - collection of more utilities from FreeBSD
gnarwl - Email autoresponder based on LDAP
mailagent - An automatic mail-processing tool and filter.
plan - X/Motif day planner (dynamically compiled with LessTif)
sork-accounts - Account handling framework for horde
sork-vacation - Manage vacation notices in horde
vacation - email autoresponder

There are several alternatives.  The original was removed from 
bsdmainutils and now resides in its own package exactly because it is so 
often abused or misused that it's better to give the administrator the 
option of installing it or not.

I don't know why your system doesn't have it.  Perhaps you need a better 
way to browse available packages.

J.
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      Jeme A Brelin
     jeme at brelin.net
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