Category Archives: Vacation

The Vacation Mail Responder

First beta release of Vacation 1.2.8.0

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Vacation 1.2.8.0-beta1 is a release that fixes a long standing bug handling wrapped email headers. Many thanks to Zdenek Havranek for the fix!

Richard Keech contributed a chkvacation script to enable/disable and check your vacation status. He also contributed some SELinux information for Vacation that you can find in the INSTALL file.

It also has some minor changes to the build system including the ability to do “make install DESTDIR=/foo/bar” and to also put the German manual page in the correct location.

Please see the ChangeLog for more information.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vacation/files/vacation/1.2.8.0-beta1/

Please test and let me know of any bugs you find!

Vacation 1.2.7.1 Released

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Vacation 1.2.7.1 is a bug fix only release which now complies with RFC-3834 “Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail”. A big shout of thanks to Dr. Tilmann Bubeck, the Fedora packager, for bug fixes and a German translation of the manual page.

You can download this latest version of Vacation from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vacation/files/vacation/1.2.7.1/

It includes:

  • a fix from Dr. Tilmann Bubeck to stop Vacation from munging the GECOS information of users and instead pass it quoted to the MTA for it to deal with (fixes Fedora bug #553505 and SourceForge issue #2928189).
  • Vacation now adds the Auto-Submitted: header as per RFC3834 (fix from Dr. Tilmann Bubeck).
  • Vacation now abides by the RFC 3834 header “Auto-Submitted:” (fixes SourceForge issue #3062665).
  • Fixes up some Coverity grumbles (a redundant fopen() and others).
  • Compiles cleanly with GCC 4.6.2.
  • Now includes a vacation.spec file contributed by Magnus Stenman.
  • The old HTML version of the manual page was out-of-date and so it has been removed (along with html2man) leaving the nroff version the master.
  • Added German translation of the nroff manual page (Dr. Tilmann Bubeck).
  • Note that the English man page has been renamed to vacation-en.man and vacation.man is a symlink to it, so German speakers can just change that symlink before installing to pick up the German translation.
  • Clean up of some old directories in the source code that have been made obsolete by source code control (they contained old, applied, patches).

You can be involved in the development of Vacation by subscribing to the vacation-announce and vacation-list mailing lists and/or logging bugs and feature requests on the SourceForge tracker.

First Release Candidate for Vacation 1.2.7.1

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Vacation 1.2.7.1 rc1 is the first release candidate for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.

This release fixes up a warning for orighdr in GCC 4.6.x. It also includes a German translation of the manual page courtesy of Dr. Tilmann Bubeck, the Fedora packager, and some cleanup work (removing obsolete directories).

Note that the English man page has been renamed to vacation-en.man and vacation.man is a symlink to it, so German speakers can just change that symlink before installing to pick up the Dr. Bubecks translation.

Please do grab this and test it out!

If I don’t hear any problems before next weekend I intend to release this as the official Vacation 1.2.7.1.

Second beta release of Vacation 1.2.7.1

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Vacation 1.2.7.1 beta2 is the second beta for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.

This release just fixes up some issues that Coverity revealed, none of which appeared to be harmful.

NB: If you compile with GCC 4.6 and see a complaint about orighdr being set but never used in rfc822.c don’t worry, its already fixed in git and will be in the first RC (assuming nothing bad is found in this version).

Please grab this beta release and test it and report any problems!

First beta release of Vacation 1.2.7.1

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Vacation 1.2.7.1 beta1 is the first beta for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.

It contains only two bug fixes, firstly adding the Auto-Submitted: header as required by RFC 3834 and secondly stopping vacation munging the GECOS information of the user and instead just passing it in a quoted form for the MTA to deal with.

Both of these patches are from Dr Tilmann Bubeck who is the packager of Vacation for the Fedora project. I’m very grateful to him for his time and patience in submitting these!

Please grab this beta release and test it and report any problems!

Vacation Migrated to Git at SourceForge

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After a long hiatus I’ve restarted work on Vacation and have kicked off proceedings by migrating from SVN to Git (which SourceForge started offering about 18 months ago) (( I ended up using the svn2git Ruby Gem to do this as the usual “git svn clone” didn’t seem to work that well. )). This means you can now clone the Git repo to do work with and have the complete history of the project available to you, even if you’re not connected to the Internet at the time.

You can find more information on using Git with SVN here: https://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=git&group_id=3852

I’ve realised from this that a lot of the bug fixes that had been done on the 1.2.7 branch had not been merged back into trunk whilst working in SVN, so I’ve now made those changes to the ‘master’ (what Git calls SVN’s trunk) and pushed those back to SourceForge.

I’m hoping to roll a 1.2.7.1 release in the near future to pick up a few changes on the 1.2.7 branch that should really be out there.

Vacation 1.2.7.0 Released!

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I’m happy to announce the release of Vacation 1.2.7.0.

This is a complete rebase of the current Vacation code base from the closely related version at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the two clause BSD license (no advertising clause).

This means Vacation finally links legally with the GPL’d GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!

New features in this version are:

  • Vacation will not reply to emails that have the SpamAssassin “X-Spam-Status: Yes” header, thanks to Roberto Piola.
  • It uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to enhance resilience.
  • Vacation now uses Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook for much better parsing RFC2822 email addresses.
  • Should (hopefully!) compile on FreeBSD thanks to Marshal Newrock.
  • Vacation will silently create its database if it is missing (previously it just crashed!).
  • Lots of bug fixes!

This version (still) does not implement support for folded headers for those headers it worries about (From:, Reply-To:, etc), that requires a major reworking of the code that is currently underway in the trunk of the Subversion repository.

Thanks to all those who’ve submitted bug fixes, requested enhancements and sent patches, especially Roberto Piola, Marshal Newrock and Daniel Pittman.

You can download the program from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3852&package_id=3820&release_id=611078.

Vacation 1.2.7.0 rc1 released

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This is the first release candidate for vacation 1.2.7.0 and fixes a segmentation fault for a broken Reply-To: header where there is no address specified.

I’ve also added a KNOWN_BUGS file which lists the fact that vacation currently doesn’t cope with multi-line (wrapped) headers, this is scheduled to be fixed in 1.3 and work is in progress in the SVN trunk for this.

Please test this and report back – if you find any problems please do report them!

Download the release from SourceForge.