One of the more common administrative tasks for any administrator of a mail server is to work with users on enabling various rules. One such rule is the Out of Office email messages. These messages can be enabled to automatically send responses to people that send email to those accounts when a user is not going to be checking mail. These can be somewhat frustrating for people on list serves, but they are a great way to be able to step away from your email in the event that you’re, I don’t know, Out of the Office. I should learn to rely on these more when I’m on vacation, but that’s another story…
To enable an Out of Office message for Lion Server’s Mail server is a fairly straight forward process. To do so, log into the web portal as the user whose mail you will be configuring an Out of Office message for. Once logged in, click on Settings at the top of the screen. From here, click on the Filters tab. From the Filters screen click on the plus sign icon (“+”) above the Filter Name sidebar. to create a new filter.
Here, provide a name for the filter in the Filter name field (e.g. Out of Office). Then select all messages in the For incoming mail: field. Use the Reply with message in the …execute the following actions: field. Then, for Reply with message, use the Message body to indicate what the contents of the email that is used to reply to senders should contain. Use the Message subject field to provide a subject in the response and if you’d like other accounts cc’d (e.g. an assistant or someone else handling your support inbox) provide a list of accounts, separated by a comma). Finally, use the How often send messages field (not taking into account whether the name of the field is grammatically correct) to configure how frequently the message will be sent (e,g. 1 would be once per day, 2 would be once every other day, etc).
Once you’re satisfied with your entry, click on the Save button.
I’ve seen a few instances where the filters weren’t running properly. These have usually been due to the fact that the RoundCube configuration file is missing the information needed to send on behalf of the mail server. To provide this information, check out the RoundCube configuration file, main.inc.php in /usr/share/webmail/config. Also, if webmail has the wrong reply-to address (can happen if I forget to set the hostname before enabling the service), correct the following line in there:
$rcmail_config['mail_domain'] = '';
