E-Mail Autoreply

An easy way to distribute information about your company to your potential clientele is to set up an E-Mail autoreply, or autoresponder. An autoreply is an E-Mail Alias which executes a program that automatically replies to any E-Mail sent to the specified address. The message in the autoreply can be anything you choose, such as a FAQ, marketing plan, or product listing.

Installation

To install the autoreply program, connect to your Virtual Private Server via SSH or Telnet and run the following command.

% vinstall autoreply

Once the program is installed, you can configure an autoreply by doing the following.

1. Compose the message you want to include in your automated response and store it on your Virtual Private Server. By default, the autoreply program will look for a file in your home directory called .autoreply. You can also indicate a specific file in the autoreply command by using the -m flag.

2. Create an alias for your autoreply. The alias name (on the left side of the colon) is the address where people will send an E-Mail message to get the automated response. It is very important that you specify a different address as the from address (indicated with the -f flag) to avoid autoresponder loops. The following example is a typical autreply alias:

   info: YOU@YOUR.ISP, "|/usr/bin/autoreply -f info-reply -a info"

   Note that in the example, the incoming message will be forwarded to the address YOU@YOUR.ISP in addition to generating an automated response. The following flags can be used to customize the behavior of the autoreply.

   • To specify a different message file, use the -m flag:

     -m path/to/message/file

   • The -f flag is to specify the From: field in the outgoing message. This should be different from the alias name to avoid autoresponder loops.

     -f info-reply

   • The -a flag specifies the user the autoreply is for. This should match the alias name.

     -a info

     NOTE: If you are creating an autoreply for a Virtual Subhost, the username after the -a should be the user in the virtmap entry, not the E-Mail alias in the ~/etc/aliases file where the actual autoreply command is.

3. Run vnewaliases to update your etc/aliases.db file.

   % vnewaliases