How do I make vacation autoresponding work for aliases?

Question

We have an e-mail server on Ubuntu 18.04 running Postfix and Dovecot. How can I make vacation autoresponding work for our user's aliases?

Example: Say our Deputy Librarian is theirname@ourlibrary.com and that's also their user and e-mail account on the system, the one I sudo su theirname to in order to run the vacation program. But they also have an alias in /etc/aliases called deplib, so that e-mails sent to deplib@ourlibrary.com also get to them.

I have tried invoking vacation with -a deplib and then -a deplib@ourlibrary.com but neither worked. Only e-mails sent to theirname get the autoreply.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. I find e-mail administration to be somewhat over my head!

Answer 1

Ok, I found a way to make it work.

It could be that when I run 'vacation' and it asks me the questions like 'would you like to edit (the vacation message)', that this isn't the vacation program proper.

What I had to do was, after enabling the vacation program for them, edit their .forward file to be as follows, tacking on the -a deplib:

\theirname, "|/usr/bin/vacation theirname -a deplib"

I also removed .vacation.db so I could try again from the same external e-mails and rebooted the server. I was finally able to get autoresponses for both theirname and deblib (separately through two separate external e-mail services).

The problem with this method, though, is that each and every alias has to be manually specified. In this particular case it's not a huge screaming deal, because most of our users that want vacation autoresponders only have a single alias in routine use, or none. But this works for now.