On 21 April 2011 22:36, Tim Evans <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> All: What are the "modern" equivalents for out-of-the-office message
> management for folks who don't use MS LookOut?  I found a Thunderbird
> plug-in, but it requires an add-on (sieve) for the RHEL dovecot IMAP server
> RedHat doesn't provide.
>
>
The problem with vacation is that it needs the machine that's running it to
be turned on and running while you're away; this may not be a problem for a
desktop machine or an account on a server but it's a little limited for a
laptop.   This may not affect you, but it's possibly why vacation is
considered "old".

Another potential problem is that vacation didn't used to take into account
whether you were listed in the recipient list in the message header.  There
are a _few_ things that are more annoying that 20+ out-of-office replies
when you send a message to a list :-)

Finally, vacation may not work at all.   It requires (or used to require, I
haven't checked for a few years) your mail to be delivered to the machine it
is running on.  It integrates well with sendmail and local mail drops, but
is pretty poor otherwise.  If you're using dovecot this may well affect you.

Finally, the modern replacement is an action performed by the mail server.
A lot of mail servers have something that you can use with varying degrees
of accessibility.  Often its a web page (google mail for example) and
sometimes the web interface to mail will do the trick (Zimbra, I think, and
Outlook Web Access let you set up out-of-office messages).   Sometimes you
have to use a client that can say the right things to the server.

This brings me neatly round to dovecot: you'll need something running in
dovecot to provide the vacation message.  I don't know if dovecot provides
that, but that's what you should be looking for.

jch
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