AutoReply E-Mails?

September 15, 2005 10:36 AM

AutoReply E-Mails: with what software do I do this, and what does it $?

To promote my little consulting biz, I am interested in setting up Auto-reply e-mails; you know, "send an e-mail with "WORD" in the subject line, and x documentation will be sent to you (possibly in the body of the e-mail; possibly as an attachment)." A primer, please. By the way, I'm using Mac OS X.

posted by ParisParamus to computers & internet (6 comments total)

you can do it for free with a yahoo email, just set the vacation auto responder on in the prefrences, however all emails recieved will get an automatic responce, it won't filter the subject headers
posted by psychobum at 10:40 AM on September 15, 2005

Most webservers using cpanel have this functionality. You can create unlimited addresses with which to do this if you own your own domain name.
posted by letterneversent at 10:59 AM on September 15, 2005

OS/X is Unixy, isn't it? Would procmail work here?
posted by jozxyqk at 11:02 AM on September 15, 2005

I use phpwebhosting.com for my hosting and their mail management tools include options for setting up auto-responders.

Do you have a dedicated domain name? If not, why not? Nothing more ghetto looking that someone with a gmail or hotmail account address for a business I'm supposed to take seriously. I know it's an unfair generalization but it's an immediate reaction for me.

You should be able to find a number of hosting companies that will provide autoresponders. Having your own domain allows you an infinite number of email addresses and therefor an infinite number of autoresponders.
posted by phearlez at 11:10 AM on September 15, 2005

I'm thinking there has to be some way to do this in Apple Mail, using a rule with a "Run Script" as an action. The trick, though, is passing the relevant info as a parameter...

But, yeah, get a domain.
posted by mkultra at 11:45 AM on September 15, 2005

Ah, come to think of it, you can do it this way:

- Add a rule to Apple Mail that says "If SUBJECT contains [your keyword] then Set Color to [some mail color you never use], Run Script [Info Mailer Script], Set Color to [some other mail color you never use]."

"Info Mailer Script" is an Applescript that does the following (my syntax is going to be off, but the gist should be correct):

tell application "Mail"
set flaggedMail to (every message in inbox whose subject contains "[your keyword]" and whose color is [first mail color set]"
repeat with aMail in flaggedMail
set aRecipient to sender of aMail
-- create your email message here, with whatever attachments, send to aRecipient
end repeat
end

The one advantage to this is that you know exactly who you sent something to (via the second color), and if the script ever fails, Apple Mail will leave the messages in a sort of "pending" bin (via the first color) that the script can later pick up.
posted by mkultra at 11:59 AM on September 15, 2005