Smart Autoresponders! Please!

SiteWorx Feature Requests
1

Whether it’s the vacation message or the actual stand-alone autoresponders in Siteworx, I’d love to know if there is a way to make them more “intelligent”. Is there some hack I can do from the command line? If not, I’d like to see these features enhanced in future releases.

Here’s what I mean by more intelligent. For example, Plesk allows you to create an autoresponder and only send out the response to a specific e-mail address a maximum number per day. You can also set a number for how many unique addresses it will store. The other nice feature is the ability to specify a condition for when the response is delivered. Like whether the subject or body contains specific words. Not to mention, being able to specify whether the response is plain-text or HTML.

I also noticed that when I try to update my vacation message, it won’t take. It just keeps reverting back to the original message I created. So, this appears to be a bug to me.

I bring this up because right now I created a vacation message on my main address. Regardless of how many times somebody sends an e-mail to that address, they get the auto response every time. It’s quite annoying for my clients. Once they get the response once, they shouldn’t see it again for the rest of the day. Is there no way to add some more features to the Siteworx autoresponders?

2

make them more “intelligent”.

I agree, the current setup for this is less than ideal.

only send out the response to a specific e-mail address a maximum number per day.

You can make it do this, yes, athough it’s not documented anywhere. Edit: /usr/local/interworx/lib/autorespond/vacation.sh

Make the second to last line this:

$AUTORESPOND 86400 1 $USERDIR/vacation $USERDIR

and save the file. Note that this will change the behavior for all vacation messages server wide - you can’t change this for just one user or domain for example right now. 86400 is one day/24 hours, the “1” is the number of messages to send to an e-mail address in that time period.

You can also set a number for how many unique addresses it will store

I don’t see a way to do this, but what’s the value added by having this feature (just curious)?

I also noticed that when I try to update my vacation message, it won’t take. It just keeps reverting back to the original message I created. So, this appears to be a bug to me.

It appears to be a bug to me also. You have to workaround this one by disabling the vacation setting, and then re-enabling it.

whether the subject or body contains specific words. Not to mention, being able to specify whether the response is plain-text or HTML.

These are good ideas, but they aren’t instantly available. Thanks for the feedback, we’ll definitely make a note of it for a future release :slight_smile:

Paul

3

At present, the behavior of the autoresponder is such that once the limit specified with the second number is reached, it’ll no longer deliver mail to the account. It won’t just stop responding.

The development team’s been notified of the oversight.

4

I’ve lost customers before over the lack of (decent) autoresponders. At the simplest level, I’d like it to be possible to upload a microsoft format *.msg file to the control panel and point the autoresponder to that - this could then be nicely formated, have attachments, whatever. Useful for distributing info - eg product instructions by simply quoting an e.mail address.

I’d also like to see the ability to provide start and end dates.

Finally, in a bigger company one wouldn’t want the average “joe bloggs” to have access to the company domain, so how is he to setup his autoresponder ? If your running exchange/oulook its easy.

Maybe a simple wizard etc that sends a scripted batch file to the domain’s mailserver which contains the text for the autoresponder would be a good feature. if it was sent say to autoresponder@mydomain.com, and interworx knew to take the text and use the sender’s reply address when creating an autoresponder you’d have a good system.

5

I wouldn’t know how to help you the truth