The Vacation Service Protocol is the core of a system designed to allow users with e-mail accounts to access vacation e-mail services without ever having to login to a UNIX account, or be concerned with the contents of .forward files.
At its heart, VSP is simple TCP protocol acting as a front-end for the standard UNIX vacation program. The protocol itself is open, and 3rd-parties are encouraged to provide their own implementations. (I'm especially interested in seeing commercial E-mail client and server products implement either the server or client half, as appropriate.)
At the present, a server for UNIX systems running sendmail and a proxy for WWW browsers (such as Netscape) is provided. (The proxy itself is implemented as a perl CGI script and will require a WWW server supporting CGI scripts -- Apache and Netscape Enterprise servers are both known to function properly.)
Note: The files in this directory are tar archives compressed with GNU zip. You can find both GNU zip and GNU tar at the main GNU repository located at ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu. (Most UNIX vendors ship with a "tar" utility, so you'll probably only need GNU zip if you don't already have it.)
For questions about VSP, please contact the author at garrett@damore.org.