Hello.
Not sure exactly where this problem lives, so it may not be appropriate
to ask here, but since I already lurk on this list, seems like a good
place to start.
I was recently charged with building a new mail server.  I decided to
try Bruce Guenter's qmail-autoresponder again, but am about to put it on
the shelf for the second time, I am stuck on the same problem as last
time.  It appears a number of other people are able to make it work
properly, but for me, while the responder does respond and keep track of
responses, it does not interact correctly between the qmailadmin
interface and the .qmail file.  Before I call it quits, I figure I
should see if there is something I have overlooked.

Preliminary:
-I have modified the autorespond.c and user.c files to have the proper
command line syntax (as per this and other similar suggestions:
http://forum.qmailrocks.org/archive/index.php/t-3.html)
-I have run the ./configure command with
--enable-autoresponder-path=/usr/local/bin/qmail-autoresponder and
verified that said path is valid
-I have also tried ./configure with
--enable-autoresponder-bin=/usr/local/bin
-I am using qmailadmin-1.2.13 and qmail-autoresponder-0.97

What works:
-When a user fills in the auto-response fields in qmailadmin, the .qmail
file is modified, the vacation directory is created, and the message
file is created.
-A sender will get a response, under the vacation directory an empty
file is created to keep track of who has been responded too already.

What doesn't work:
-After a vacation message has been set in qmailadmin and the modify-user
button has been clicked, the related fields are all cleared and it
appears on the qmailadmin interface that there is no vacation message
set.
-If a vacation message is set multiple times (as is apt to happen when a
user sees his stuff disappear), the .qmail file is modified to include
an additional entry for the vacation message.  One can pretty quickly
accumulate 5 or 10 entries for the qmail-autoresponder program.
-of note, the vacation message is always overwritten with the latest
message.
-After some days (more than one, less than 5) qmail-send started
throwing errors with regards to vacation response.  Unfortunately, these
errors have rotated out of the logs already.  manually removing the
auto-response entries from the .qmail file  fixed that up, though.

Investigation:
-using auditd, I am able to determine that when a change is made to
the .qmail file by qmailadmin, it is being done by user vpopmail and
from the qmailadmin file.
-On another mail server with the inter7 autorespond, I compared the
directory structure and permissions of the vacation folder and .qmail
file.  They are identical on both machines, yet the data in the
created/modified files does not appear to be available to qmailadmin.
-In as much as the qmail-autoresponder is responding, the program is
functioning fine, this would have me believe the modifications to the
command line parameters in the .c files were successful.  The problem,
at least from my perspective, is that the existence of the auto-response
entries in the .qmail file and the existence of the vacation directory
and its contents seems to be hidden from qmailadmin.
-Interestingly, qmailadmin does retain mail routing settings (forwards),
and has no problem modifying the .qmail to adjust for these settings,
even when the .qmail file has upwards of ten auto-responder lines in it.

Questions:
-Not being a programmer, I find code overwhelming and cryptic.  Not to
say I can't hack some things up, but I haven't found any more instances
in any .c files that look relevant to changing from autorespond to
qmail-autoresponder.  Not that I am sure what relevant should look like.
Are there some suggestions on how I might zero in on this apparent lack
of communication between qmailadmin and the related vacation files?
-I have read articles that suggest qmail-autoresponder may become the
default qmailadmin responder some day in the future.  Is there any truth
to this?

Thank you...


Bob Miller
334-7117/633-3760
http://computerisms.ca
[email protected]
Network, Internet, Server,
and Open Source Solutions


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