Vacation Mail Responder / News: Recent posts

Vacation 1.2.8.0-beta1 is a release that fixes a long standing bug handling
wrapped email headers. Many thanks to Zdenek Havranek for the fix!

Richard Keech contributed a chkvacation script to enable/disable and check
your vacation status. He also contributed some SELinux information for
Vacation that you can find in the INSTALL file.

It also has some minor changes to the build system including the ability
to do "make install DESTDIR=/foo/bar" and to also put the German manual
page in the correct location.... read more

Vacation 1.2.7.1 is a bug fix only release which now complies with RFC-3834 "Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail". A big shout of thanks to Dr. Tilman Bubeck, the Fedora packager, for bug fixes and a German translation of the manual page.

It includes:

- a fix from Dr. Tilmann Bubeck to stop Vacation from munging the GECOS information of users and instead pass it quoted to the MTA for it to deal with (fixes Fedora bug #553505 and SourceForge issue #2928189).
- Vacation now adds the Auto-Submitted: header as per RFC3834 (fix from Dr. Tilman Bubeck).
- Vacation now abides by the RFC 3834 header "Auto-Submitted:" (fixes SourceForge issue #3062665).
- Fixes up some Coverity grumbles (a redundant fopen() and others).
- Compiles cleanly with GCC 4.6.2.
- Now includes a vacation.spec file contributed by Magnus Stenman.
- The old HTML version of the manual page was out-of-date and so it has been removed (along with html2man) leaving the nroff version the master.
- Added German translation of the nroff manual page (Dr. Tilmann Bubeck).... read more

Vacation 1.2.7.1 rc1 is the first release candidate for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.

This release fixes up a warning for orighdr in GCC 4.6.x. It also includes a German translation of the manual page courtesy of Dr. Tilmann Bubeck, the Fedora packager and some cleanup work (removing obsolete directories).

Note that the English man page has been renamed to vacation-en.man and vacation.man is a symlink to it, so German speakers can just change that symlink before installing to pick up the Dr. Bubecks translation.... read more

2011/10/20

Vacation 1.2.7.1 beta2 is the second beta for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.

This release just fixes up some issues that Coverity revealed, none of which appeared to be harmful.

NB: If you compile with GCC 4.6 and see a complaint about orighdr being set but never used in rfc822.c don't worry, its already fixed in git and will be in the first RC (assuming nothing bad is found in this version).... read more

Vacation 1.2.7.1 beta1 is the first beta for the first bug fix only release in the 1.2.7 branch.

It contains only two bug fixes, firstly adding the Auto-Submitted: header as required by RFC3834 and secondly stopping vacation munging the GECOS information of the user and instead just passing it in a quoted form for the MTA to deal with.

Both of these patches are from Dr Tilmann Bubeck who is the packager of Vacation for the Fedora project. I'm very grateful to him for his time and patience in submitting these!

Vacation has now migrated from using Subversion (SVN) to Git at SourceForge. This means you can now clone the Git repo to do work with and have the complete history of the project available to you.

More information here:

https://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=git&group_id=3852

I’m happy to announce the release of Vacation 1.2.7.0.

This is a complete rebase of the current Vacation code base from the closely related version at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the two clause BSD license (no advertising clause).

This means Vacation finally links legally with the GPL’d GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)! ... read more

This is the second release candidate that cleans up some cosmetic warnings and fixes a trivial memory leak.

If there are no more bug reports (ha!) then this will get released as 1.2.7.0 in the near future.

Catching up on things, I've released a new stable release and the first release candidate for the next stable branch of Vacation.

1.2.6.4 is a minor bugfix release to the stable branch which purely changes the default location for manual page installation to be /usr/share/man rather than the old /usr/man.

1.2.7.0-rc1 is the first release candidate for vacation 1.2.7.0 and fixes a segmentation fault for a broken Reply-To: header where there is no address specified.... read more

This release of vacation fixes a brown paper bag bug that broke compilation completely. Apologies to everyone for not spotting either it or the bug report on the tracker! :-(

This release also fixes the case where a user who had configured a .forward file for vacation but had not created the database with the -i option (or had the database removed for some reason) would find that vacation generated an error. Vacation will now silently create the database if it is missing.

Vacation 1.2.7.0-beta4
----------------------

This beta release updates the build process to remove the -m486 flag on non-PPC systems as the distros are already doing this.

* This may break backwards compatibility on
* AMD64/EM64T based systems, the fix is to run
* vacation -I to reinitialise your database of
* addresses you have received email from.

The option '-i' has been added as an alias for '-I' and documented in the manual page.... read more

Missed this announcement, sorry!

This is a minor bugfix release to the 1.2.6 series of Vacation inspired by looking at the sorts of things Linux distros patch for their own usage.

Vacation no longer builds as -m486 by default, though it will build as 32-bit on AMD64/EM64T because GDBM is not 32/64-bit portable and trying to run a 64-bit version against a 32-bit created GDBM causes it to fail and syslog a success message. This is sub-optimal.... read more

Another quick release, this time changing the address parsing for From: and Reply-To: headers to use Eric Raymonds rfc822.c library from his Unix Cookbook, and fetchmail (you can enable the old behaviour by compiling with the -DOLD option).

It also fixes the bug that broke the -r option, there was a stray ":" in the getopt(3) call that meant it expected an (unnecessary) argument.

There's a couple of trivial tweaks too.... read more

This new beta may be more on the alpha side of beta as it includes a substantial number of changes to improve security. Rather than using the standard strcpy, strcat, etc it now uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to try and avoid possible buffer overruns. I'm not actually aware of any attacks but this is quite old code so you never know your luck.... read more

This is a complete rebase from the version of Vacation at http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=vacation which had been released under the modified BSD license with no advertising clause. This actually means Vacation finally links legally with GDBM (something I don't believe people previously realised)!

This beta also includes a patch graciously supplied by Roberto Piola that makes Vacation ignore emails that have the SpamAssassin "X-Spam-Status: Yes" header set, indicating that it believes they are spam.... read more

It would appear the migration is done successfully, so I've disabled the CVS button and enabled SVN access.

We're currently moving the Vacation project from using CVS to SVN. This shouldn't take too long, we just need to wait for the SourceForge system to crank over and run the queued import request.

Chris

This is a minor bug fix release to incorporate the "Precedence: bulk" header into all generated responses and to update the maintainer information.

I have now taken on the task of maintaining the Vacation Mail Responder, I'd like to thank the previous maintainers for their help in arranging this transition and allowing me the opportunity to try and bring the codebase back out of deep freeze.

I would ask for some patience though as I'll need to get up to speed with how to use SourceForge and the state of the code, not to mention the out-of-tree patches available from sources like the Debian project, etc.... read more

I, thecivvie, no longer maintain Linux Vacation.

Vacation 1.2.6.1 is released as a bug fix for a stupid mistake in the new rfc-2369 keyword setup

Vacation 1.2.6 has been released. This new release adds support for rfc-2369 keywords, therefore lessing the change of vacation mail going to a mailing list. download from http://vacation.sourceforge.net

This a bug fix (again) but does fix a serious bug in previous versions which
was a security risk. All users are advised to upgrade to this version.

Vacation 1.2.3 has been released. This is a bug fix release and a couple of
major bugs have been fixed. Should this release fix all outstanding
releases, then I plan on adding one or two new features.

An update to vacation, the email responder, has been released. This is a
HIGH upgrade as it fixes a problem with vacation not sending the contents of
.vacation.msg