>One of these programs is called "vacation".
I know, when I send mail to one of my Unix colleagues I get an automatic
answer saying "/usr/staff/(...)/vacation: segmentation fault, core
dumped" :-) The purpose of this message is, of course, to inform me that
he is away until his VAX runs out of disk space, at which time the angry
users will find him wherever he is and he'll have to come back and clean
up the mess :-)
More seriously:
>A member of my list told me that the vacation program will not respond
>to mail that has a header with the field Precedence: bulk in it.
Look at your average non-BITNET distribution list header, and see if you
find a 'Precedence: bulk' there. Chances are that you won't; the program
does not create problems for non-BITNET lists because it doesn't answer
any message whose header contains '-REQUEST@' (but don't suggest that the
program be modified to ignore messages containing '-L@', you'd get burned
on a bonfire before you have time to finish your sentence).
The program will also not answer any mail which doesn't have the userid
of the person running vacation in the 'To:' or 'cc:' field; if you're
running 1.6 and the user in question is subscribed with a non-BITNET
address (which is extremely likely), he will get mail which does not have
his name in the 'To:' field and the program should not answer, except of
course that there is an option (by the intuitive name of '-j', "generate
as much 'j'unk mail as you can"), telling it to answer anything coming
into the user's mailbox; I suppose the user in question made use of this
option.
Finally, vacation nastygrams are by default not sent more than once a
week; if you get an answer for each posting, it probably means the user
set the delay to 1 second, telling the program to make sure to answer
each and every message in order to compensate for the decrease in traffic
due to the messages the user will not be writing during his vacations.
And the same user will be more than willing to explain how LISTSERV is
violating a huge array of internet standard documents by not putting
"Favourite-Ice-Cream: Raspberry" in the headers it generates, thus
causing a lot of unwanted traffic.
>Is there a way to get LISTSERV to include this field in the header that
>it produces when distributing list mail?
There is no way to do that, but if you install 16E-003O on your server it
will happily throw away the second and following messages from the user
in question; in addition, if his program is indeed set up as explained
above to answer absolutely everything even if an answer has been sent to
the same sender just 10 sec ago, it will start a mail war with LISTSERV
which will cause him to be served off, and any further vacation (or
non-vacation) message from that user will be discarded.
Eric
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