automatic mail reply

[Kevin Cosgrove 627-5212]

John,

> I just sent mail to someone and got a (generic) reply immediately.
> When I did a finger on the person, I noticed they hadn't logged on
> since yesterday.
> 
> She is on vacation (so I can't ask her how she did it).
> 
> Does anyone know how to set up an account to automatically send a reply
> without having to log on?
> 
> John L Bergquist
> 
>       ->bard   ->c164-2ag
> ucbvax->zooey  ->c162-ba
>       ->franny ->c8-rd
>       ->seymour->c9d-af

It sounds like you have 'vacation' installed on your system.  What 'vacation'
does is send the mail on to the mail spool while sending notification of
the recipient's absence to the originator.  It's great for when one leaves
town and can't get to their mail right away.

If yours works like ours, then an entry of the following in your ~/.forward
file will work fine -- of course you'll have to change the "kevinc" to your
login name.

\kevinc, "|vacation kevinc"

If that doesn't work, you might try consulting the manual pages for 'mhook'
and 'vacation'.  I haven't had to resort the 'mhook' approach since
the 'vacation' scheme works so well for me.
_____________________________________________________________________________

	Kevin Cosgrove           	Tektronix, Inc.
	11K Plug-Ins Project Leader	PO Box 500, M/S 47-092
	LIM Product Test Engineering 	Beaverton, OR  97077
	kevinc at bearcat.LIM.TEK.COM	(503)-627-5212
_____________________________________________________________________________