Enhancement for vacation Utility

Starting in the Solaris 10 release, the vacation utility has been enhanced to enable a user to specify which incoming messages receive autogenerated replies. With this enhancement the user can avoid sharing confidential or contact information with unknown people. Messages from spammers or unknown people would not receive a reply.

This enhancement works by matching an incoming sender's email address to a list of domains or email addresses in a .vacation.filter file. This file is created by the user and is in the user's home directory. If a domain or email address match is found, a reply is sent. If no match is found, no reply is sent.

The .vacation.filter might contain entries such as these:

company.com
mydomain.com
onefriend@hisisp.com
anotherfriend@herisp.com

Note that each line contains one domain or one email address. Each entry must be on a separate line. For a sender's email address to match with an email address entry, the match must be exact, except for case. Whether the letters in the sender's address are lowercase or uppercase is ignored. For a sender's email address to match with a domain entry, the sender's address must contain the listed domain. For example, both somebody@dept.company.com and someone@company.com would be a match for a domain entry of company.com.

For more information, see the vacation(1) man page.