autorespond

Simple autoresponder for qmail.

==============================================

Mail is sent to help@my-company.com. An automatically generated response is sent back to the user with an address of "help@my-company.com". You can set the envelope sender to an empty string. However, some programs will parse the message for the "From:" field and send an autoresponse back to it. It is received at your autoresponder, and you now have a mail loop.

This autoresponder also catches some other simple situations such as mail from a mailer-daemon, empty envelope sender, bulk precedence headers, etc.

INSTALL:

First thing, if your qmail distribution is not in /var/qmail, then edit autorespond.c and change QMAIL_LOCATION to point to the correct directory.

If you do not want to make use of the 2 optional commandline options edit the 2 defines:

• DEFAULT_MH -> corresponds to the "flag" optional parameter
• DEFAULT_FROM -> connesponds to the "arsender" optional parameter

There shouldn't be anything else to configure. Compile:

make
make install

Usage:

Usage is as follows:

autorespond time num message dir [ flag arsender ]

 time - amount of time to consider a message (in seconds)
 num - maximum number of messages to allow within time seconds
 message - the filename of the message to send
 dir - the directory to hold the log of messages

 optional parameters:

 flag - handling of original message:

   0 - append nothing
   1 - append quoted original message without attachments <default>

 arsender - from address in generated message, or:

   + = blank from envelope ! 
   $ = To: address will be used

For example, in your ~alias directory, create a .qmail-help file with the following:

|autorespond 10000 5 help_message help_autorespond 1
&your-email-address@company.com

This will allow up to five messages from the sender within about 3 hours and include the original message as a quote.

|autorespond 10000 10 help_message help_autorespond 0 +
&your-email-address@company.com

This will allow up to ten messages from the sender within about 3 hours and will NOT include the original message as a quote and will leave the from field blank.

Create a file in your ~alias directory called help_message. It should say something like this:

From: Support <help@company.com>
Subject: Help Response

This is a response to your help request.


Below is a copy of the message we received.

---

Make sure that "From:" is the first line of the file. You should probably include the dashes to separate your help message from the user's message. An example is included with this package.

Create a directory called help_autorespond in your ~alias directory. This is where the log of messages goes.

That should be it.

Notes

9/18/2003

• If the maximum count has been reached, the autoresponse doesn't get shipped out, but the message is still processed as usual. This is a change from older versions because it didn't make sense before.