Auto-responders in sendmail

[Jeff Mincey]

Despite a Google search, I'm unclear as to how to do something as basic as set an auto-responder message in sendmail. If anyone has a ready-made recipe for this procedure, or if, God forbid, there is a GUI tool which can make this straightforward, please advise or supply a url. I'm comfortable in command line shells but I'm hoping for a quick and easy GUI tool that will perform the heavy lifting for me.

Rimuhosting's otherwise excellent how-to articles and a text-string search of these forums have returned negative results up to now.

Jeff Mincey
Minneapolis, Minnesota
USA

[retep]

I was googling this the other day. And you're right, there isn't a simple/clear way to do this.

One of the reasons for this, i read, is that it is possible for infinite delivery loops to be created unless one is very careful. e.g. auto responder says 'so and so is out of the office', the recipient has an autoresponder that say 'so and so is out of the office' and around it goes.

FWIW, squirrelmail apparently has a couple of autoresponder plugins. That was the closest I could find. And may warrant further investigation. It's either that or write a custom procmail filter, I'd say.

[SpaceAdmiral]

I haven't tried actually using this, but, assuming you have the Webmin control panel:

Click "Servers" at the top, then click "Sendmail Configuration" and "Mail Aliases."

In the "alias to" field there is an option "Autoreply from file." I assume that you could just put some autoreply text in a file and do it this way.

Another option under "alias to" is "feed to program." I assume that you could use this for more complicated autoreplies that depend on message content.

I hope that helps.

[Jeff Mincey]

Thanks Peter and Space Admiral for the information and suggestions. I'll give it a go and if it works I'll report the results here.

Jeff

[jerwilkins]

Any easy way to do autoresponders on a standard Debian VPS discovered since 2005?