[imp] Vacation Message

[Joseph Brennan]

--On Tuesday, November 7, 2000 11:10 -0600 Eric Jon Rostetter 
<eric.rostetter@physics.utexas.edu> wrote:

>> Hi,
>>
>> I?d like to have a imp plugin for auto-generated messages
>> or a user frontend to .vacation
>> Is there anything around ?

The client should not assume that the server is a unix host, or even
if it is, that the imap account has a home directory in which to put
vacation files.  The recent proposals for a procmail front end make
the same bad assumption.  This stuff does not belong in IMP.

At sites that have hardcoded their installation of IMP to go to only
one specific imap host, then it would certainly be appropriate and
useful to place a link in the IMP pages to a page where separate
software can write vacation files, .procmailrc, and so on.  IMP need
only provide a simple way to stick those links into its menu.  It
could appear to users to be part of the same web mail service, but
from a software perspective it's separate.

If an IMP installation is viewed as simply a frontend for one mail
host, maybe the ideal software would be something else that runs
on the mail host and just provides an interface directly between
an authenticated https session and the mail files.

Joseph Brennan                           postmaster@columbia.edu
Academic Technologies Group, Academic Information Systems (AcIS)