17.4 Vacation Autoreply Attributes

The set of user LDAP directory attributes that the vacation action uses are:

• Attribute defined by the MTA option LDAP_AUTOREPLY_ADDRESSES

  This attribute provides the ability to generate :addresses arguments to sieve vacation. This option has no value by default. The attribute can be multivalued, with each value specifying a separate address to pass to the :addresses vacation parameter.

• Attribute defined by LDAP_PERSONAL_NAME

  Alias processing keeps track of personal name information specified in this attribute and will use this information to construct From: fields for any MDNs or vacation replies that are generated. Use with caution to avoid exposing personal information.

• vacationStartDate

  Vacation start date and time. The value is in the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSSZ. This value is normalized to GMT. An autoreply should only be generated if the current time is after the time specified by this attribute. No start date is enforced if this attribute is missing. The MTA can be instructed to look at a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_START_DATE MTA option to a different attribute name.

  This attribute will be read and checked by the code that generated the Sieve script. Vacation processing will be aborted if the current date is before the vacation start date. This attribute cannot be handled by the script itself because at present Sieve lacks date/time testing and comparison facilities.

• vacationEndDate

  Vacation end date and time. The value is in the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSSZ. This value is normalized to GMT. An autoreply should only be generated if the current time is before the time specified by this attribute. No end date is enforced if this attribute is missing. The MTA can be instructed to look at a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_END_DATE MTA option to a different attribute name.

  This attribute will be read and checked by the code that generated the Sieve script. Vacation processing will be aborted if the current date is after the vacation end date. This attribute cannot be handled in the script itself because at present Sieve lacks date/time testing and comparison facilities.

• mailAutoReplyMode

  Specifies autoreply mode for the user mail account. Valid values of this attribute are:

  • echo - Create a multipart that echoes the original message text in addition to the added mailAutoReplyText or mailAutoReplyTextInternal text.

  • reply - Send a single part reply as specified by either mailAutoReplyText or mailAutoReplyTextInternal to the original sender.

    These modes will appear in the Sieve script as nonstandard :echo and :reply arguments to the vacation action. echo will produce a “processed” message disposition notification (MDN) that contains the original message as returned content. reply will produce a pure reply containing only the reply text. An illegal value will not manifest as any argument to the vacation action and this will produce an MDN containing only the headers of the original message. Note also that selecting an autoreply mode of echo causes an automatic reply to be sent to every message regardless of how recently a previous reply was sent.

    The MTA can be instructed to use a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_AUTOREPLY_MODE MTA option to a different attribute name.

• mailAutoReplySubject

  Specifies the contents of the subject field to use in the autoreply response. This must be a UTF-8 string. This value gets passed as the :subject argument to the vacation action. The MTA can be instructed to use a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_AUTOREPLY_SUBJECT MTA option to a different attribute name.

• mailAutoReplyText

  Autoreply text sent to all senders except users in the recipient's domain. If not specified, external users receive no vacation message. The MTA can be instructed to use a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_AUTOREPLY_TEXT MTA option to a different attribute name.

• mailAutoReplyTextInternal

  Auto-reply text sent to senders from the recipients domain. If not specified, then internal users get the mail autoreply text message. The MTA can be instructed to use a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_AUTOREPLY_TEXT_INT MTA option to a different attribute name.

  The MTA will pass either the mailAutoReplyText or mailAutoReplyTextInternal attribute value as the reason string to the vacation action.

• mailAutoReplyTimeOut

  Duration, in hours, for successive autoreply responses to any given mail sender. Used only when mailAutoReplyMode=reply. If value is 0 then a response is sent back every time a message is received. This value will be converted to the nonstandard :hours argument to the vacation action. (Normally the Sieve vacation action only supports the :days argument for this purpose and does not allow a value of 0.)

  If this attribute doesn't appear on a user entry, a default time-out will be obtained from the AUTOREPLY_TIMEOUT_DEFAULT MTA option. The MTA can be instructed to use a different attribute for this information by setting the LDAP_AUTOREPLY_TIMEOUT MTA option.

The MTA can chose between multiple LDAP attributes and attribute values with different language tags and determine the correct value to use. The language tags in effect are compared against the preferred language information associated with the envelope from address. Currently the only attributes receiving this treatment are LDAP_AUTOREPLY_SUBJECT (normally mailAutoReplySubject), LDAP_AUTOREPLY_TEXT (normally mailAutoReplyText), LDAP_AUTOREPLY_TEXT_INT (normally mailAutoReplyTextInternal), LDAP_SPARE_4, LDAP_SPARE_5, LDAP_PREFIX_TEXT and LDAP_SUFFIX_TEXT.

It is expected that each attribute value will have a different language tag value. If different values have the same tag value the choice between them will be essentially random.