On 13-Feb-06 Ian Douglas wrote:
On Thursday, February 09, 2006 9:30 AM, Ted Harding wrote:
First, you ask about email clients that can respond automatically in this way. The one I've been using for years, XFMail, has this kind of thing built in. ... You can set up various kinds of rules to act on mail messages in various ways. ... A rule can act on a message which is one of: -- incoming (action when mail is received) ... Rules look for text matches (regexp style) in one of: ... -- Body ... Action triggered by rule can be one of: ... -- Respond (delete and send specified file as response message) ...
Excellent!
Thanks for your suggestion Ted. I spent the weekend installing and experimenting with XFMail and, although it appears to be quite an old program, it seems to do exactly what I want and is now "live" happily autoresponding away.
Happy that it works as you wish! Yes (as indeed someone else mentioned) it is indeed an old program which has not been developed further since about 2000/2001. And the version which I now use is even older (1.3-alpha from March 1998), replacing one I started using about 1996. (I do have a more recent version or two around, but didn't like the changed button-bar icons which they introduced).
The motive which led me to XFMail in the first place was the fact that you can open, simultaneously in distinct windows, as many messages as you like (including one you are composing), so it is easy to cross-reference between messages.
Another aspect, which I only appreciated as an advantage after some time of use, is that it supports (indeed as default) the "MH" mailbox format, in which each message is a separate file (whose name is a number).
This can make it very easy to locate messages by using text search tools such as 'grep' and then pipe located messages to other tools such as 'awk' or 'perl'. E.g. if I want to see when you sent messages to ALUG (and which I have retained):
grep "spamcatcher1" Mail/LISTS/ALUG/* 2>/dev/null | grep From: | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}{print $1}'
gives me the following files:
Mail/LISTS/ALUG/1633 Mail/LISTS/ALUG/1660
so now
for i in `grep "spamcatcher1" Mail/LISTS/ALUG/* 2>/dev/null | grep From: | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}{print $1}'` ; do cat $i | grep "^Date:" ; done
gives the results:
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 08:35:30 -0000 Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 08:11:47 -0000
And maybe this sort of thing could some day be a possibility for your "responder"? (Though clearly you already seem to have things running as you want).
All best wishes, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-06 Time: 09:52:11 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------