Simple Multi User Out-Of-Office-Responder 20070720

Simple Multi User Out-Of-Office-Responder project is a vacation email responder that can be easily plugged into simple SMTP servers with procmail.
We have a small e-mail server running on Debian GNU/Linux. All users are local (in /etc/passwd), have mail delivered via procmail to mailboxes in /var/mail and can access it with POP3, IMAP or squirrel-mail webmail. Pretty standard, simple setup which works quite well. The only thing missing was an “out of office responder”.
The standard and simple setup would be to use the ‘vacation’ program. However, this was not suitable. The users don’t have shell access to the server for security reasons. And even if they did, they wouldn’t be able or willing to use SSH to log on and type commands. Let alone use vi to edit the actual message. We needed to come up with something more user friendly.
The idea was to have something which would:
plug in easily to the existing infrastructure of local users, Postfix, procmail and
be user friendly.
We evaluated a couple of existing options, especially phamm and gnarwl. They all fell short, because they were too complex.
Phamm stores users in LDAP and uses postfix virtual domains to deliver e-mail to some other component, completely replacing procmail.
Gnarwl also uses LDAP but then delivers e-mail to local mailboxes with procmail. Unfortunately, while testing it, we couldn’t get it to work at all and the debugging was not helpful at all. Even looking at the source code didn’t help to find out why it didn’t work.
Enhancements:
- This release adds an IMP plugin.