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.
Yes, I can see why others, and indeed yourself, suggested that using a mail client as an autoresponder may be a bit of an overkill and is not very efficient; but it makes the task very quick and easy to set-up and configure. The only real problem I had was how to stop it automatically inserting "I'm on vacation" into the "Subject:" line. Thankfully XFMail's help pages, although rather basic, provided the solution and explained how to replace the subject line with custom text.
Thanks once again to you all for your very useful suggestions!
Ian.