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 Set Up an Auto-Response or Vacation Message on your Ruby Account

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Set up vacation service for your Ruby account

An e-mail autoresponder, or vacation service, automatically responds to the senders of selected incoming e-mail messages with a prepared message. In this way, you can notify anyone attempting to contact you that you are on vacation, out sick, or otherwise unable to read and respond to your e-mail.

  Set up vacation service for your Ruby account

Important! If you are forwarding mail from your Ruby account to your Onyen account, the following steps will also disable your message forwarding. If you do not want to disable your message forwarding, follow the instructions from ITS for [ http://help.unc.edu/?id=763 ] setting up and disabling your Onyen vacation messages instead. By following those steps, all those sending to your SILS and UNC accounts will receive the vacation message. Just remember to list the SILS (ils.unc.edu) account as an account that is forwarded as noted in the Onyen instructions.

  1. Log in to your Ruby account. Type vacation at the prompt. This will open the pico editor that allows you to edit the message that will be sent in reply to incoming e-mails. By default, you will see:

    Subject: away from my mail I will not be reading my mail for a while. Your mail regarding "$SUBJECT" will be read when I return.

    Change the content of the message to match your needs.

  2. Exit the editor (see the keyboard commands at the bottom of the screen; ^ means the Control key) and it will save the file as /home/username/.vacation.msg.

  3. You will also need to make sure you have a .forward file set up correctly. To create one, enter pico .forward . This file must contain one line only (see the example). First is a backslash character (\), followed by your login name, and then a pipe character, the full vacation command path and your username in quotes (hint: the first character after the open quotes, the "pipe" character, is the vertical line found on your keyboard, usually near the backslash).

    You can copy the following example, but substitute your username where it says username. \username, "|/usr/bin/vacation username".

  4. Exit the editor. This will forward your vacation message to people while you are away.

  Disable your vacation service  

  1. When you return, you will want to stop your vacation messages. This is a matter of removing or renaming the .forward file so that it no longer forwards the vacation message. It is a good idea to save it as something else so that you can use it again later. To do that, at the command line, type mv .forward forward.vac.

  2. If you would instead like to remove the file, type rm .forward .