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Configuring Vacation Email Responder for Sendmail

Aug 11

wingloonLinux 3 Comments

Vacation is the automatic mail answering program found on many Unix systems. This write up will guide you on how to install and configure the vacation email responder and setup it using the popular webmail SquirrelMail in Fedora Core 6.

Requirement: Vacation, Sendmail, SquirrelMail, SquirrelMail Vacation Local plugin, vsftp and Fedora Core 6

1. Download vacation-1.2.6.1.tar.gz from the link below: -
http://vacation.sourceforge.net

2. Extract the vacation to a temporary directory as below: -
tar xvfz vacation-1.2.6.1.tar.gz -C /tmp

3. Change directory to /tmp/vacation as below: -
cd /tmp/vacation

4. Run the “make” command as below: -
make

5. Copy the “vacation” binary to “/usr/bin” as below: -
cp vacation /usr/bin

6. Create a softlink in the Sendmail’s restricted shell utility “smrsh” as below: -
cd /etc/smrsh
ln -s /usr/bin/vacation vacation

7. Next, lets proceed with installing and configuring SquirrelMail’s Vacation Local Plugin. Download vacation_local-2.0-1.4.tar.gz from the link below: -
http://www.squirrelmail.org/plugins_category.php?category_id=19

8. Extract the vacation local to SquirrelMail’s plugin directory (in Fedora Core 6) as below: -
tar xvfz vacation_local-2.0-1.4.tar.gz -C /usr/share/squirrelmail/plugins

9. Run the SquirrelMail’s config command as below: -
cd /usr/share/squirrelmail/config
./conf.pl

10. In SquirrelMail Configuration Main Menu, key-in “8″ to enter Plugins menu. Next, key-in the number that refer to “vacation_local” to install the plugin

11. Create the Vacation Local configuration file as below: -
cd /usr/share/squirrelmail/plugin/vacation_local
cp config.php.sample config.php

12. Edit the config.php file and change the following as below: -
$ftp_passive = 1;

13. Next, you need to enable the vsftp service in init level 3, 4 and 5 as below: -
chkconfig --level 345 vsftp on

14. Let’s start the vsftp service as below: -
service vsftp start

You can now begin to use the SquirrelMail’s vacation local plugin to configure the vacation email responder for Sendmail.

Source: Vacation Email Responder

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