autoreply: a safe, rate limited autoresponder

Introduction

autoreply is a simple autoresponder useful for replying to email upon receipt.

Features

autoreply has been designed to be used safely without supervision. It remembers who it has replied to recently, has a list of addresses that it will not respond to (MAILER-DAEMON, majordomo, listserv, etc), and examines headers checking for mailing lists.

In case these features are insufficient autoreply also has a rate limit, and will not send more than a specified amount of mail in a given time. The rate and interval are configurable.

Installation

The 1.2 release is available as a gzip'd tar archive containing the source and a FreeBSD-2.2.7 binary. Download this from:

http://www.nemeton.com.au/sw/autoreply/autoreply-1.2.tar.gz

To unpack the software on a system with GNU tar (such as FreeBSD):

tar zxvf autoreply-1.2.tar.gz

On a system without GNU tar:

gzip -dc autoreply-1.2.tar.gz | tar xvf -

On a non-FreeBSD system the program will have to be compiled. This can be done by typing "make clean" and then "make". On a FreeBSD system the binary may be used in its current location or moved, as preferred.

Configuration

reply message format

The text file that will be sent should contain mail headers, particularly a "From: " line.

If the -s option is used a "Subject: " line should not be supplied in the text file.

An example file:

From: Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au>
Subject: 'autoreply' 1.2 release
Precedence: bulk

The 1.2 release of my autoreply program is available at:

http://www.nemeton.com.au/sw/autoreply

...

configuring with qmail or mdforward

Choose an address for testing, and in its control file place directions similar to the following. Don't forget to deliver the incoming mail somewhere in addition to the autoreply command!

| /home/user/autoreply-1.2/autoreply /home/user/autoreply-message
/var/mail/user

(Change the pathnames to suit your installation.)

configuring with .forward

The format from a sendmail .forward file is similar, but should should have double quotes around it:

"| /home/user/autoreply-1.2/autoreply /home/user/autoreply-message"
\user

configuring with procmail

The following procmail receipe will pass incoming mail to autoreply. The "c" is required or the mail will be considered "delivered" and further receipes will not be used.

:0 c
* ^TO_(autoreply|responder|autoresponder)@
| /path/to/autoreply /path/to/autoreply.txt

Advanced Configuration Options

usage: autoreply [options] file
       -c count    maximum number of messages per interval (default: 30)
       -h pathname path to history file (default: $HOME/.autoreply/histfile)
       -i interval interval in minutes (default: 30)
       -l logfile  path to log file (default: $HOME/.autoreply/log)

The -h and -l options will be of interest to people running multiple autoresponders in the one account.

Author

autoreply was written by Giles Lean. Problem reports, questions and enhancement requests are all welcomed.

To be notified of updates, please subscribe to the annoucements only mailing list by sending a mail message to autoreply-announce-request@nemeton.com.au with content

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