[I've added comp.mail.imap to the newsgroups line]

Dale Friesen wrote:
> One of my managers wants an auto-response to go out to anyone who
> e-mails her while she's away. I know how to set this up in mail.app, but
> it seems to me that there should be a way to get the response generated
> on the mail server (which is just using the built-in mail software). I'm
> running OS X Server 10.4.3.

As far as I understand OS X server uses Postfix for SMTP and Cyrus for
local delivery and IMAP and POP support.

Cyrus IMAP can have "sieve" enabled. If it does then you need to create
a sieve script for the particular user that looks something like

require "vacation";
vacation
:days 7
:addresses "bosses-email-address-goes-here"
"I'm away on holiday. If you need me you are just out of luck";

This needs to be edited as a plain text file.

The ":days" part is to limit people getting an autoresponse for each
message that they send. So this says send the autoresponse to a
particular sender only once every 7 days. You can shorten that to 3
days if you like. Setting it to 0 (NOT recommended) means always send
an autoresponse even if the person mails you 100 times a day.

The ":address" part is very important. An autoresponse will only be
generated to messages that have the address in the To: line. You can
list several addresses. This is so that mail sent to mailing lists that
the boss is one, or otherwise bcc'ed to the boss will not generate an
autoresponse.

Scripts can be much much more complicated. Most people use them to
automatically sort mail into different folders. I have an IMAP folder
for each mailing list I'm on and use a sieve script to get messages
delivered to the right folders. More can be done as well (forwarding
for example).

Now installing the script is the tricky bit. Apple may have a nice tool
to do this (but I don't have OS X Server to play with). So if the cyrus
IMAP server is compiled with the sieve module, then you probably have
something called sieveshell on the server as well.

sieveshell is the way for users upload sievescripts. I'm guessing that
you should be able to run it (from the command line) as

% sieveshell -u IMAP-username localhost

You'll be prompted for the user's password.

Then, if your script is in a file called vacation.script within
sieveshell issue the command

> put vacation.script
> activate vacation

I believe that as root it is possible to skip sieveshell and drop the
script somewhere in /usr/sieve/, but I don't know exactly what it should
be named or what permissions it should have.

I realize that this is a lot. I also realize that this won't be enough.

I've never set up or managed a cyrus IMAP server (that will change in a
matter of weeks). And I don't know what changes Apple may have made to
things or what tools they've provided. So please don't expect
everything I've said to work perfectly.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoted or HTML posts
My Reply-To address is valid.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> I've never set up or managed a cyrus IMAP server (that will change in a
> matter of weeks). And I don't know what changes Apple may have made to
> things or what tools they've provided.

Ah. I finally found where Apple documents this. (I did look before my
previous post). Take a look at

http://images.apple.com/server/pdfs/...vice_v10.4.pdf

particularly pages 53 and following.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoted or HTML posts
My Reply-To address is valid.