vacation + plea to unix geeks

I wanted to remind folks that i will be departing next weekend for one month; there will be no email. If there’s anything i need to take care of before i go, please let me know now.

Also, can i get a little help from the unix geeks out there? I have most of my procmail set up. All mailing list messages will be sent to /dev/null and that works like a charm. What i can’t figure out how to do is get the bounce line working for everything else. A friend suggests that it’s a combination of formail and sendmail and sent me this to plug into procmail:

:0
*
| (formail -r; cat “danah has turned off email for June 2005; please re-write in July if it is still relevant”) | sendmail -oi -t

I feel lame because i don’t know enough about either formail or sendmail (and the manpages aren’t getting me anywhere – more lameness). Since that doesn’t actually work, what do i need to do? Help?

(Once i get that working, i’ll post it for all of the rest of you who want to kill email during vacation. There’s no need to come back to hell and void your entire relaxing break.)

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6 thoughts on “vacation + plea to unix geeks

  1. gilbert

    Change “cat” to “echo”, and just in case, you should remove the semicolon. A la:

    :0
    *
    | (formail -r; echo “danah has turned off email for June 2005. Please re-write in July if it is still relevant”) | sendmail -oi -t

    …and it should work as expected.

    g.

  2. joe

    what gilbert said… echo is for strings, cat is for other things and you’d have to escape the semicolon I believe to use it.

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