Setting up an automatic reply to mail when you are away also know as a vacation message.
Using Hermes
For people using Hermes this is done using the Hermes Webmail Interface. The Computing Service have a leaflet describing how to set vacations and forward email.
Using DAMTP
For people using the damtp email system, that is people whose accounts were set up before Michaelmas Term 2005, who haven't decided to switch over to using Hermes yet, it is a somewhat more complicated. There is a somewhat easy way and a harder way. As mentioned below the vacation auto-reply system will (by default) reply only once every 7 days to messages from the same sender. If you need more control over how frequently replies are sent back you need to use the options below (so you can't use the Easy Way instructions).
First the Easy Way
In your damtp home directory or samba space, create a file called vacation.txt and in this file put the response you wish to send to people who email you while you are away. When the file vacation.txt is present and readable this activates the auto reply message. To deactive it after you return remove or rename the file. Samba users who find this description hard to follow may prefer the samba specific instructions here.Using this setup will only reply to messages addressed to your login-name or main damtp e-mail address. If you want it to reply to mail addressed to any other addresses (role addresses, @cam addresses etc), you will need to use the method described below.
Now the Traditional Way
By using Exim filters directly you have more control over several parameters in the vacation reply.
Firstly set up the message that you want sent to the people who email you.
Create a file in your home directory called .vacation.msg and put in a message to be sent as a reply. You can use variable expansions like $header_subject to substitute the subject line of their message into the message you are sending them. e.g.
I'm off on holiday ('til about November 14th). Your message regarding:
$header_subject
will not be read 'til then. If it is work related (DAMTP or CMS
business) you may want send a copy to somebody-else@ damtp.ac.uk
Then create a file in your home directory called .forward and put the line
# Exim filter << DO not remove
at the top of it.
If you already have a .forward file, which you will if you filter your spam emails, then it should already have the line mentioned above, put the lines given below, after the spam filtering sections. This is so it reduces the chances of sending vacation replies to the spammers.
If you use your .forward file to forward emails without using exim filters than you will not have the line above and will need to change the way you do the email forwarding first.
Add the following to your .forward file
if personal
then
vacation subject "Put your message subject here"
endif
This will only reply to mail sent to your login-name and your main damtp email address.
If you want it to reply to mail to some other address (or alias) then you need to add an alias statement. e.g. for your @cam address
if personal alias username@ cam.ac.uk ...
If you have more then one extra address, e.g. you forward your @cam and some ISP mail to damtp, then it would become something like:
if personal alias myaddress@ myisp.co.uk alias username@ cam.ac.uk ...
When someone emails you it will automatically reply, but only once every 7 days for the same sender. If you want to change the frequency of automatic replies add in a once_repeat statement after the vacation subject part e.g.
...
then
vacation subject "Put your message subject here"
once_repeat 3d
endif
for replies once every 3 days.
To see this combined with spam filtering and a few other examples read the sample .forward file.
For more options see the full exim filter documentation, especially the section for the mail/vacation statements.
When you return, you obviously want to comment out or delete the code in your .forward file. You can comment the code out by inserting a # before each appropiate line and then simply uncomment it next time you are going away (but don't forget to update the .vacation.msg file!
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