Re: [cobalt-developers] Autoresponders...

["Steven Werby" <steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> We are having problems with receiving an autoresponse on one of our
domains.
> We received this reply from a tech support person but it doesn't seem like
> it makes sense.  Can anyone confirm this?
>
> "This is happening because the Vacation Auto-Responder only send out one
> mesg., Then after a couple of weeks will purge a db that contains the
email
> addresses and will send them again."

This is standard behavior.  The vacation autoresponder is not a true
autoresponder.  It is designed to let people emailing you know that you are
on vacation.  If you're on vacation for a few days it would be irritating to
get an email back telling me you're on vacation every time I email you so by
default the Cobalt vacation autoresponder notifies the sender only once and
won't notify them again until 7 days have lapsed and I email you again.

If you want, you can edit /usr/local/sbin/vacation.pl and change 604800 (#
of seconds in a week) to a much lower value.  You could even change it to 1
so that in effect the vacation autoresponder becomes a true autoresponder.
If you do that your users will likely have a lot of irritated friends and
associates though.

If you really want a true autoresponder, your best bet is to use procmail.
procmail is a great program.  It can be used to route emails to
users/folders, create an email file server, autoresponders and much more.
You'll just need to locate a procmail recipe for an autoresponder.  Setting
up procmail and installing or writing a procmail autoresponder is not
exactly an easy task if you're not very Linux-savvy.  If you need assistance
with this you can contact me off-list, though I can't promise I'll have the
time to help.  You may want to read more on procmail at
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/users/reriksso/procmail/mini-faq.html to get
started.

Steven Werby {steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx}