[H-GEN] auto-reply and other mail filtering (was Re: Unthreaded mail)

[Tony Nugent]

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On Sun Apr 27 2003 at 11:39, Sandra Milne wrote:

> And for the person who wanted to know what "auto-replying" is. Ok, you're
> running a home based business say, and your website links people to email a
> certain address which is then forwarded to your account without having the
> headers mangled. You can setup so that your incoming mail is scanned, and
> any email to that address causes an automatic reply to be generated to the
> author of the message telling them, well, whatever you want really.
>
> I've used this before in order to setup parties, and even to tell people
> that I'm away on vacation and won't be home until such-and-such a date.
> It's something I've grown rather fond of, and I'd die without it at work
> (groupwise does it too).

On a unix box, these sorts of thing are not very difficult to do
with procmail and many other local MDAs (mail delivery agents).  The
procmailex(5) man page is full of examples.

procmail can do what you describe above, and a lot more besides -
its recipes (tests and commands) are run in a shell environment, so
you can customise things very heavily.  You could use it to run a
small mailing list, and plug all sorts of things into it to sort and
otherwise mangle your email, including spam assassin and virus
scanners.

I've been using it for many years to pre-sort and filter my email,
with the number I get as admin/log/cron notices[1] and from at least
a couple of dozen mailing lists, it has quite literally saved my
sanity :)

  [1] I've done things like filtering admin email and feeding its
  contents into a database (via a perl script).

Recommended.

> Sandra.

Cheers
Tony

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