Is it possible to have multiple aliases with vacation? Yes!
Imagine you have a sendmail setup with a virtusetable that looks like this:
fred@domain_name.com fred fredrick@domain_name.com fred fred.bloggs@domain_name.com fred
And you want to use vacation for an out of office response. The requirements may be that if somebody sends an email to fred@ or to fred.bloggs@ you want the OOO message to be sent, but not frederick@. In the .forward file you would need to use the following setup:
"|/path/to/vacation -a fred@domain_name.com -a fred.bloggs@domain_name.com fred"
You can add multiple ‘-a’ switches to accommodate the number of mail accounts.
The Vacation database
The vacation database keeps a record of who has been ‘autoresponded’ in order to not send them multiple responses within a pre-determined time period. the default is 1 week. To see the content of the database, sue the following syntax:
vacation -l user_name
You get a response like this:
user@some_domain.com Sun Oct 2 22:47:08 2011 user@another_domain.com Sun Oct 2 22:40:16 2011
The database can be wiped by either deleting the file .vacation.db or using the command:
vacation -i user_name
