exim autoreply with message delivery
 

I read the spec and came across:

"The autoreply transport is not a true transport in that it does not cause the message to be transmitted."

I've seen this at work this past week with a user who's been on vacation. The autoreply transport I setup for it works great! ...if by great you mean we've lost every email sent to that address since she went on vacation, including a few "eyes only" confidential emails that understandably could not be sent to the person in charge of their in-office affairs for the week (they lack the clearance the original user has).

My questions are as follows:

1. Are these messages anywhere? It would seem from a few greps that they aren't, but I'm TOTALLY willing to have one of you correct me on that!

2. What can I do to have vacation autoreplies AND still have the users receiving their messages? I'm looking into piping to vacation, but if you guys have a quick link, reference or advice, it'd save me some googling.

3. Consider this one optional, but... I've thought about this a lot since I observed it in operation, and according to the spec it's just doing what it was written to. WHY would it be logical enough to do this way that exim would be specifically designed to do this out of the box? It's one of those things that's wierd enough there's gotta be SOME sort of reason, but I'm just not seeing why someone wouldn't want to receive their (potentially VERY important) email once they get back from vacation.

Any help would be appreciated! Answer all three and I might even name my first born after you! ;)

Thanks in advance,
Bob..

OK.. So I found the solution to my problem..

I just needed to add "unseen" in the director calling the transport (which, for lack of a better term, forks the delivery and allows one copy of the message to go on with delivery while the other meets whatever nasty unknown fate awaits at the end of the autoreply transport).

It'd be nice if the spec listed that tidbit in the section for autoreply, and I've sent in a request for it so hopefully noone else will have to go through the hassle I did heh....

though, I still fail to see why it'd be a good idea to just stop delivery after an autoreply...I can see why it might be handy to use an option to do so, but for that to be the default behaviour will confuse me for time to come..

ah well...more important things right now...it's whisky o' clock!