The available options for an autoresponder are:
This option allows the user to request a listing of the available files. If this option is enabled, users can request a list of available files by sending email to the autoresponder with the following command in the body of the message: LIST FILES .
Note: This option only works in conjunction with the Send Files Only on Request option.
This option is used to send a copy of incoming messages to another user on your system. This is often used to read any other text present in the messages.
Note: Only one user may be listed in this field.
This check box is used to log all incoming responses to a given file. The format of this file is:
< responder name >,< from address >,< time >,< response >
This option allows you to also specify what the log file will be named and where it will be located.
Note: When entering in the file name you must use the full path to that file as well.
This option will allow you to send attachments through a responder. In order to use this function however, the file must be pre-encoded using an encoding utility.
Consider how you want your autoresponder to behave. You may want to send the same Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file to everyone who inquires. Alternatively, you may have six products and you may only want to send a product information sheet on a specific product, depending on the customer request.
If the Send Files Only On Request box is not selected, your autoresponder will behave in the first manner; it will treat all correspondence the same. The Edit Responder Items dialog is used to determine what files to send to all inquirers. It will send all of the files in an unspecified order, with an identifier of `first' coming first and `last' coming last.
If the Send Files Only On Request box is selected, your autoresponder will look at your correspondents' mail to see what they are requesting. Your correspondents will also need to request files, and they must form these requests in the body of the message sent to the autoresponder.
Files may be requested in two ways. They may be sent as text files by using the following form:
The optional mode portion of the request is used to determine what kind of encoding should be specified with the file to be sent. The mode options are plain, base64, and uuencode, with the default being plain for text files and base64 for binary files. Base64 is MIME and plain is the standard text default. The file-identifier portion of the request determines which file to retrieve by using the identifier assigned to it.
These requests have lines of the form:
send [mode=<mode>] <file identifier>
For example, your correspondents may send either of the following requests:
In order for users to retrieve multiple files from a responder, they will need to specify each file on it's own line such as:
Note: Requests made to an autoresponder are not case sensitive.
Automatic response to incoming mail is a wonderful thing, but sometimes it can be too much of a wonderful thing. This is particularly true when you automatically respond to automatically generated mail. It is possible to set off a chain reaction that will generate a great deal of traffic between two automatons, with no benefit whatsoever to any humans. The No Auto-Respond feature of SLmail is an attempt to avoid such situations.
The basic operation of SLmail's response suppression feature is pattern matching on addresses. SLmail searches incoming mail addresses for the specified patterns, and if one is encountered, no auto-response is generated.
For example you may wish to enter:
In this situation, mail from any mailer-daemon generates no auto-response from SLmail. This helps avoid situations where bounced mail generates an auto-response, which generates bounced mail, which generates an auto-response ... a cycle that could go on indefinitely.
You may use the "*" as a wild card value.
Note: "No-response" entries may not contain a domain marker symbol ("@"). That is to say, you may not enter a specific address at a specific domain as a No-response pattern entry. For example, you might enter the account name autoresponder in which case the responder will not respond to any mail account with the name autoresponder as the user name.