OSEC

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Subject: Re: ??: vacation solution
From: Michael H. Warfield (mhwwittsend.com)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 17:58:01 CDT

On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 03:33:13PM -0700, Tom Spindler wrote:
> > username: username, "|/usr/bin/vacation username"

> > But I think /usr/bin/vacation NEEDS a homedire to save it's database and
> > other stuff. Tricky. Anybody out there knowing a better solution?

> I've written a home-brewed vacation replacement I call holiday(1);
> it was written for our mail server that users have POP and web access
> to, but no login privs. It stores both the received-message Froms
> and the alias db in Berkeley DB files.

        Hmmm... Homebrewed vacation programs are some of my bigest
headaches running mailing lists... Let's see if you met most of the
standard requirements...

        1) No replies to any message with precedence "bulk" or "list".

        2) No replies to any specific address more than once.

        3) No replies to any auto-responder (another vacation program).

        4) No replies to DSN (Delivery Status Notifications - AKA RSVP).

        5) No replies to postmaster, mailer-daemon, or other error
reporting.

        6) All replies contain information identifying the message it
is responding to like a fragment of the text or subject. (You just have
to love the messages from "vacation-daemon" that says "I've received
your message and will read it later" and leave you with no clue who
it was or what message).

        Anyone else want to contribute any pet peeves that these damn
things should leave alone?

        BTW... I know an individual in the Army who warned several officers
NOT to use vacation programs (clueless Windows users and likely to hurt
themselves - they did). Weeks later, he sent out an announcement to a
list of people and got vacation responses back from two of them. As an
experiment (and being a Unix kind of person who had the clues to know
how to do this) he forged in a message to one of them from the other.
The result was over 8000 messages in each of their mailboxes by the time
they got back. Of course, they each blamed the other for starting the
food fight.

        These rules ARE for a reason!

        Vacation programs are also the Internet equivalent of someone
leaving a message on their answering machine like "Beep, you have reached
the Smith household. We are on vacation for the next two weeks and the
house will be vacant. For emergencies, we have left the key under the
front door mat. Have a nice day." Most of the time you have identified
the account name and machine in your E-Mail and notified unknown parties
that it will be unchecked and unsupervised for a period of time. I've
seen these show up on security mailing lists were I can guarentee that
many of the denizens do NOT have your best interest at heart.

> It's quite rough around the edges, but seems to work reasonably well
> for us. I've attached it here as a whopping 5k file...

        I haven't checked your file but if you don't meet the listed
requirements above, I would avoid using it, least someone demonstrate
to you the folly of your ways.

        Mike 

-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhwWittsEnd.com
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 331-2437   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
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