MacOS X has had some strange changes made to it recently. Take vacation, for instance. I believe that the version used by MacOS X came from the sendmail distribution, which is perhaps the reason that it has vanished from recent versions of MacOS X. The net effect is that creating a simple autoreply vacation message is next to impossible.<\/p>\n
If you check the MacOS X Server documentation, you’ll find that Sieve is installed, and you’ll even find an example script for vacation, which sounds great. But then the Sieve installation on MacOS X isn’t usable – you need at least to install timsieved and enable the sieve tcp port to provide reasonable access to create sieve scripts. What is more, having user installable scripts for MacOS X users as the only way of maintaining an autoresponder isn’t acceptable.<\/p>\n
There are plugins for SquirrelMail that support the vacation program, which is great. But they still need vacation installed; the combination of both is exactly the solution needed.<\/p>\n
First, installing vacation. I found sources for a maintained version of vacation on a Debian site (see below), but there are several sources available; I simply chose to use the first one I found.<\/p>\n
To install, I removed the LIB option from the Makefile, and editing the vacation.c file to change the location of sendmail from \/usr\/lib\/sendmail to \/usr\/sbin\/sendmail. This resolves to the link that postfix puts there to handle mailers that try to use sendmail directly. Then just run make, and manually install vacation to \/usr\/bin\/vacation; you can use other locations, but that one is traditional, and you would have to edit vacation.c further to add in the new path.<\/p>\n
That seems to work.<\/p>\n
For SquirrelMail, you need to first enable WebMail, which is done in Server Admin in the Web section (not the Mail section, which had me confused for a while). You can then access your mail via http:\/\/servername\/WebMail\/, and just use your normal mail login details (same as account login for simple configurations).<\/p>\n