On Mon, 24 Nov 1997 10:06:41 -0800 (PST) 
 Bill Studenmund <skippy@macro.stanford.edu> wrote:

 > Tomorrow I'm off for a week for Thanksgiving, and I'd like to set up a
 > vacation message. I'm EMailing everyone about it as I'd like one which
 > didn't bother with replying to mailing list messages (>95% of my mail).
 > I've set up vacation before, but I don't think it will ignore mailing
 > lists. Also, unfortunatly, the machines where I get EMail are not running
 > NetBSD (one will probably switch after 1.3, but the other's an RS/6000 w/
 > microchannel).

By default, vacation(1) won't reply to mailing lists:

   No message will be sent unless login (or an alias supplied using the -a
   option) is part of either the ``To:'' or ``Cc:'' headers of the mail.  No
   messages from ``???-REQUEST'', ``Postmaster'', ``UUCP'', ``MAILER'', or
   ``MAILER-DAEMON'' will be replied to (where these strings are case insen-
   sitive) nor is a notification sent if a ``Precedence: bulk''
   ``Precedence: list'' or ``Precedence: junk'' line is included in the mail
   headers.  The people who have sent you messages are maintained as a db(3)
   database in the file .vacation.db in your home directory.

I plan on using vacation(1) this weekend while I'm camping in New Mexico,
and in a couple of weeks while I'm at the IETF.  I often use vacation(1),
and I have yet to have anyone complain that my message got reflected onto
a mailing list :-)

My .forward contains:

\thorpej, "|/usr/bin/vacation thorpej"

...and that's it.  Make sure you run "vacation -i" before you modify your
.forward.

As far as I can tell, vacation(1) is pretty much the same no matter where
you go.  But, you could also compile your own vacation(1) binary on whichever
system you receive your mail, if you're worried about different versions
behaving differently.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                            Home: +1 408 866 1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                       Work: +1 650 604 0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                             Pager: +1 415 428 6939