Sieve vacation script?

[Patrick Goetz]

I've been struggling with figuring out how to set up a sieve vacation 
reply script.  The documentation on this is pretty sparse, and the stuff 
I do find doesn't work.  For example,

[cyrus at www ~]$ sieveshell --user=research at episcopalarchives.org 
--authname=cyrus localhost
connecting to localhost
unable to connect to server at /usr/bin/sieveshell line 191.
[cyrus at www ~]$ sieveshell --user=research at episcopalarchives.org 
--authname=cyrus episcopalarchives.org
connecting to episcopalarchives.org
unable to connect to server at /usr/bin/sieveshell line 191.

I'm also not sure what the point is of sieveshell is if I'm running it 
on the mail server and not remotely; similarly for timsieved.

First question:  is there step by step explanation for manually creating 
and invoking a cyrus sieve script for a particular user?

Second question:  Ancient unix/linux users will recall a simple vacation 
program that any user could run to throw up or take down an automated 
vacation reply.  The age of sieve has made this process considerably 
more complicated, but I would like to write (or obtain) a script that 
performs a similar function for cyrus sieve; i.e. the user runs vacation 
and it automatically sets up an automated vacation reply message. 
Anyone have something like this already?

I've been beating my head against google for many hours at this point 
looking for information on how this all works, particularly with cyrus 
and haven't found anything.