- if there is a way to setup vacation noticed/automatic reply with cyrus and thunderbird
We use RoundCube web frontend to the Cyrus imapd, and it has a plugin for creating Sieve scripts, including vacation scripts. It works very well in my opinion. We also use RoundCube as an alternative to Thunderbird and Outlook for many users.
https://roundcube.net/ (for Roundcube)
https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/tree/master/plugins/managesieve (for Managesieve plugin - actively developed) This may actually come with the base Roundcube distribution.
Enable the plugin in roundcube/config/config.inc.php, in the line $config['plugins']
If I remember correctly, it worked fairly easily.
You may want to update your sieve_extensions in the imapd.conf file too, under sieve_extensions. In particular, there are vacation and vacation-seconds options.
- alternatively having a simple webfrontent to configure it
Last but not least I am lookkng for an administration/user admin tool for cyrus (group-e did that well) and did not find anything aside from cli yet
cyradm works quite well from the command line, and is Perl-scriptable (although the docs on the scripting are not particularly clear).
I haven't tried this GUI: https://admin4.org/ It claims to work with Cyrus IMAPd and others, and seems to be reasonably fresh and actively developed.
Mark