Email Auto responders

neville

Hi,

When any mail is recieved at an address I specify, i want to be able to send reply to that mail automatically.... I don't have any clue how this is done so any place I can get any detailed info on this would be much appreciated..... Also will I be able to customize the reply depending on which days it comes in or even time for that matter.

Thanks in advance.

neville

wow ..... that was quite far from what I was thinking.... problem is that I dont have access to Linux or Unix terminal... I'm working on a windows box..... Can I still make it happen ?

Any sites where i can read about it in detail ? ... something theory and also if possible some examples....

Thanks again very much for your help.

Anon

If procmail worked on windows, that would be a recommended solution.

Without spending some money, I don't think you're going to be able to do it on windows. Unless you have exchange or ccmail, if so create an account, create some filters with a message autoreply.

Anon

You can write PHP scripts under Windows and launch them at regular intervals too. Under NT, you have the "at" utility (cron-like). Under 98, you have a GUI utility that does the same. The command line is something like this :

c:\php\php.exe -q c:\path\script.php

Don't forget to increase the execution time-out (30s are probably not enough if you have many mails to process).

Anon

This code allows you to "pipe" in anything and have it saved to a file in /tmp. This is the answer. Works on PHP 4 with PHP installed as "CGI" or used just as a plain old scripting executable. The first line tells it to run using PHP and "-q" means don't bother with the HTTP crap.

This assumes the script is executable, and that you have an alias in sendmail to pipe mail to this script.

This is "proof of concept" and is not meant to do anything spectacular.

==========================
#!/usr/local/bin/php -q
<?

$tmpfname = tempnam("/tmp", "FOO");
$mailmsg = fopen("php://stdin","r");
$myfile = fopen($tmpfname, "w");

while (!feof($mailmsg)) {

$BUFFER = fgetc($mailmsg); 
$INPUT .= $BUFFER;

}

fputs($myfile, $INPUT);
fclose($mailmsg);
fclose($myfile);

Anon

Hi
Would you tell me in detail.
I am using perl script, linux server.
Do let me know
Regards
Madhura

Patrick O'Lone wrote:

I'm not a big fan of PHP as a scripting language for servers - but you can do it. You need to compile PHP as a binary and place it in /usr/local/bin/php. Then you can make shells scripts with PHP by just placing:

#!/usr/local/bin/php

at the top of any script. For e-mail auto-responders, you can build it a couple of ways. One way is to use the built-in features of using procmail.rc files. These files have extensions that are filters for mail so you can do anything you want. Another way is to intercept the mail with a program. You can do this by placing a script in /etc/smrsh. Then, in the /etc/aliases files you can add a fake user like:

myuser: "|/etc/smrsh/response.pl"

or whichever scripting language you are using. The response program will parse the mail for the sender and reply with a message by creating a new mail message and mailing it to the user. You can time-based responses by simply checking the system time. The rest of the message then gets delivered to the user ....

Anon

dddd