Issue Resolved

Wess mailscanner at ELIQUID.COM
Fri Nov 12 14:09:20 GMT 2004


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Dave,

I do believe that I am going to have a difficult time getting a vacation
script to work.  I do not create physical accounts for the users on our
servers, as they all use the same home directory. (/home/mail)

I may have found a solution.  If I use the Postfix virtual_alias_maps
directive, I can forward specific users email to a PHP script, and their
Inbox.  I will write the PHP app to check the vacation table in the mail
DB for and email address, full name, vacation duration, and the message
they wish to display.  The PHP app will then compose an email to the
sender, as the vacation user, and email them back with the details of the
vacation.

I am implementing this setup as a test on my local box, and if all goes
well, I will post full instructions for the MySQL virtual mail users out
there.  If you wish to discuss this idea/theory, feel free to find me on
irc. (Everyone is invited :) )

MailScanner on IRC
Community Support
irc.freenode.net
#mailscanner

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 21:01, Dave Filchak wrote:
      Not sure what to tell you. So I take it then that because
      your user accounts are created in MySQL, they have no home
      directories?
       
      I use Usermin/Webmin to handle the vacation side of things
      (with Usermin, the user can set their own vacation messages
      and turn it on/off). All non essential user accounts are
      created with a /sbin/nologin shell. And that is about it.
      Usermin initiates the vacation.db and creates the .forward
      file in the home directory when it is enabled. My issue was
      around writing the rule to work with log in names and
      virtusertable entries. Once I figured that out everything
      worked fine.
       
      HTH
       
      Dave

________________________________________________________________________________
            From: Wess [mailto:mailscanner at eliquid.com]
            Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 9:12 AM
            To: dfilchak at sympatico.ca
            Cc: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
            Subject: Re: Issue Resolved


            Thankfully I have only needed the vacation
            program once since I moved to MailScanner. 
            Unfortunately for me, it was very difficult to
            use, and to implement in the future if I need it.

            My configuration is:
            MailScanner 4.32.5
            MySQL 4.0.22
            Postfix 2.1.5
            SpamAssassin 3.0.1
            ClamAV 0.80

            I have all user accounts managed virtually
            through mysql.

            Here is how I got vacation to work last time:

            1.  Create new user account for the person on
            vacation (Mail users are hosted virtually, so
            they do not have user accounts...)
            2.  Set their email address to forward to their
            old inbox, and the vacation program via alias. 
            ("| /usr/bin/vacation -a username")
            3.  Configure the vacation settings in their
            temporary home directory.
            4.  Extensive testing/smashing head on wall.
            5.  Finally worked after tweaking.


            Now that you know what I did, with SQL based
            virtual hosting, is there an easier way to use a
            vacation program or script with this type of
            Mailscanner virtual hosting?  if you can help me
            out, see me on the Unofficial IRC support channel
            or simply respond here.  Vacation scripts are
            requested quite often here, and a quick way of
            dealing with them would be quite ideal.

            MailScanner on IRC
            Community Support
            irc.freenode.net
            #mailscanner

            Thanks guys!

            On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 23:15, Dave Filchak wrote:

 Just in case anyone else deals with the vacation program and thinks there
might be an issue with MailScanner:

As the people that replied said, "MailScanner" will not stop the auto
response message from being sent".

After Googling and not really clarifying much and searching the archives, I
finally got a tip (link) from Steve Swaney (thanks Steve). The instructions
were a bit clearer for my overworked brain and this got me going in the
right direction.

What my problem was, I misunderstood, how the vacation forward rules should
work.  For some of my email clients, we have a log in name and then an alias
in virtusertable to the log in name. So the rules I tried that did not work
and gave me an "unknown mailer" error were:

 \login_name, "|/usr/bin/vacation login_name"
\login_name, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a login_name"
\login_name, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a alias_name at domainname" (not sure why
this one did not work)

These all gave me an error. What worked was:

\login_name, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a alias_name at domainname login_name" Again,
this rule applies to a situation where you have usernames and then entries
in the virtusertable in Sendmail that point to these users.

I could have written it this way to set a different time interval between
responses to the same sender:

\login_name, "|/usr/bin/vacation -a alias_name at domainname -r 3 login_name"
which would set the time interval to three days (default is 1 week).

Hopefully, if any other "relatively inexperienced" person on this list
thinks he or she has an issue with MailScanner and the dreaded vacation
program, hopefully this will help. Thanks to all who replied to me.

Dave

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