I am using procmail to filter my mail. Can I turn on vacation while keeping my procmail filters working?
The vacation command is intended as a user-friendly means of inserting the “vacation filter” into a user’s mailbox. Technically, using “vacation on” will leave your procmail filter working, but it will have some undesirable effects. Among other things, vacation start adds something like the following to your .forward file: “|/software/wvacation-1/servers/wvacationd fbaggins” This causes a reply to be sent to nearly all messages passed through it. Assuming the purpose of your procmail filter is largely to filter spam (UCE), then this means a reply will be sent to nearly all UCE you receive. Many of those reply addresses are non-existent, and your mailbox will get cluttered with failure messages. Even worse, many of the reply addresses are directed to machines which never accept SMTP connections so mail cannot quickly tell that these are going to fail, and your useless vacation replies will clutter the “mail queue” on your server, waiting to time out (and then clutter your mailbox with t
