As always response from the list was terrific. Unfortunately, the answer
was right in front of me in the man page (Honest, Teach, my dog chewed it
up so bad I couldn't read it. ;-)
Special thanks to those who hit the nail on the head:
From: hollaar@ursa18.cs.utah.edu (Lee Hollaar)
From: bern@TI.Uni-Trier.DE (Jochen Bern)
From: 090632@mantaray.LANL.GOV (Mark Martinez CIC-2)
Thanks also to those who sent me good but inappropriate suggestions.
My question (in a nutshell):
Why does vacation not work when mail is sent to a user's alias?
Simple answer:
Because you have to tell vacation explicitly what other aliases the user has.
One does this using the '-a alias' option. Example (in .forward):
\username "| /usr/ucb/vacation -a alias1 -a alias2 username"
Bonus question for those who have read this far:
Is there a way to make vacation recognize the MAIL environment variable?
Most of my users use the system mailboxes in /var/spool/mail for incoming mail
but a couple of heavy users have set the MAIL variable so that new mail comes
to a file in their home account, thereby conserving space in the spool.
Vacation still sends the mail to the system spool although a copy seems to be
going to the user's home mailbox. Is there a way to modify this behavior so
that new mail only goes to the home mailbox?
TIA,
-- David R. Steiner --------------------------------------------------------
-- Research Assoc. Remote Sensing/GIS | All decisions are based on --
-- ISPA University of Vechta Germany | insufficient evidence. --
---------------------------------------------------------Nickel Hunsenmeir--
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:10:28 CDT