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 autoreply 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/filename

   • 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 virtual host, the username after the -a should be the user in the ~/etc/virtmaps 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

How do I specify "Reply-To" and "Subject" fields for my autoreply?

You can set the "Reply-To:" field and the "Subject:" field or almost any other mail header field on the first lines of your message that the autoreply sends back to the user.

You will need to separate the main body of the message from the headers by a blank line. For example you have the following in your virtmaps and aliases files:

In ~/etc/virtmaps

me@mydomain.ext                    me@myisp.net
info@mydomain.ext                  info_mydomain_ext
info-reply@mydomain.ext            info-reply_mydomain_ext

In ~/etc/aliases

In your ~/etc/info_mydomain_ext.txt file, you should do something like this:

Subject: Info from Our Company
Reply-To: info-reply@mydomain.ext

Thank you for requesting information from us.
Here is the information you wanted...

We appreciate your business.

Now your autoreply message will arrive at the users mailbox with the Subject "Info from Our Company" and with a Reply-To field of "info-reply@mydomain.ext"

Please note there is a blank line between the headers and the message body.