Vacation Messages on OS X 10.4 Server Revision as of Monday, 21 December 2015 at 02:30 UTC

The Situation

• Mac OS X 10.4.11 Server
  • Postfix, Cyrus, Dovecot
• Couldn’t put vacation in user’s homedir
• Couldn’t find vacation binary
• Other sieve programs only worked with SquirrelMail, only with user
  homedirs
• Roundcube plugin needed FTP access… to put stuff in homedirs
• Apple’s Mail Server documentation to set up sieve is crap

The Resolution

Use Cyrus IMAP’s sieve to set up a script that auto replies. It needs to
be set up first.

 sudo mkdir /usr/sieve
 sudo chown cyrusimap:mail /usr/sieve

Add yourself to user group that can administer sieve by editing
/etc/imapd.conf:

 admins: cyrusimap, admin

Now add sieve 2000/tcp #Sieve mail filtering to /etc/services.
Restart mail:

 sudo serveradmin stop mail
 sudo serveradmin start mail

Server should now be listening on port 2000:

 netstat -an | grep 2000
 tcp4       0      0  *.2000                 *.*                    LISTEN
 tcp6       0      0  *.2000                 *.*                    LISTEN

Make a vacation script. It can be anywhere. Here’s the example from the
Mail Server admin
guide:

 #--------
 # This is a sample script for vacation rules.
 # Read the comments following the pound/hash to find out
 # what the script is doing.
 #---------
 #
 
 # Make sure the vacation extension is used.
 require "vacation";
 
 # Define the script as a vacation script
 vacation
 
 # Send the vacation response to any given sender only once every seven days no matter how many messages are sent from him.
 :days 7
 
 #For every message sent to these addresses
 :addresses ["stone-purchasing@zeus.eng.uiowa.edu"]
 
 # Make a message with the following subject
 :subject "Out of Office Reply"
 
 # And make the body of the message the following
 "Test auto reply";
 
 # End of Script

Enter the sieve shell

 /usr/bin/cyrus/test/sieveshell --user=testuser --authname=admin localhost
 connecting to localhost
 Please enter your password: 
 > put vacation.msg
 > activate vacation.msg 
 > quit

This creates /usr/sieve/t/testuser. Type ‘help’ for help. Use
‘deactivate’ to remove all scripts. Test. Fin.