Out Of Office (Thunderbird, et al.)

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Has anyone written an OutOfOffice doo-hickey for Thunderbird and all other mail clients?
It seems to me that it ought to be a straightforward issue, to have a standalone program that interrogates the mail server periodically and matches the contents against a small table.
The table is taken from the spam filter white list (and/or the chosen client’s address books)

Where a sender on the server matches a name in the table, and a "noted" flag is not yet set,
   set the "Noted" flag and issue a short email to the sender.

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(Edited by jscher2000 on 22-Apr-08 13:07. )

You could search the Thunderbird Add-ons site as a starting point: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/%5B/url%5D.

Added: I didn’t find one there, maybe Google will work better.

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Chris,

If you want to do it in Thunderbird look here

But, I seem to remember other debates in the mozillazine forums suggesting that the mail server is the correct place to handle out of office, like outlook and exchange I suppose.

HTH

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Thanks John.
>in Thunderbird look here
RiceRemodeling steps through a Thumderbird autoresponder that appears to be a too-simple filter. For example, I can ask that it respond to all messages addressed to kgreaves@krisgreaves.com, which would land me in spam hell.

(later) In composing these replies I begin to see that most of the OOO responses I get come from large professional firms; they tend to have a basement full of spam filters, servers and cool dudes. I suspect, therefore, that they have resources that allow them to autorespond to every incoming message with confidence that it is not spam. I don’t have that luxury, hence my reliance on my own maintained whitelist & address books.

>the mail server is the correct place to handle out of office
I agree here, too, excepting that I don’t have the skills or resources to dabble inside my mail servers(s).

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Maybe something like Poptray http://www.poptray.org[/url%5D , (a sophisticated mail notifier which supports black- and whitelists) could be “persuaded” to do something like this. It certainly could be setup to trigger an external program based on a rule-based filter list.

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>like Poptray http://www.poptray.org ,
John, thanks for the link.
I’ve d/l and will take a look.
But Oh! I wish these guys would make them zips so I can read the manual before installing.(/rant)

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>I didn’t find one there, maybe Google will work better.
Thanks Jefferson

A Google on “Thunderbird responder” brought me to FollowUpExpert but I couldn’t readily see that it could be powered by my input. I d/l the 4MB installation file, but was reluctant to install it just to read the documentation.

A further Google thread revealed “an out of office auto reply for T bird – would require the app to be running the whole time you are away”, but I disagree with this. My mail run is every 2 hours. No reason why the autoresponder (as i outlined in the first post) couldn’t run every 2 hours. Or every 6.

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IMO, if you really are ‘out of the office’ there would be no way for T-bird or a responder to respond if neither is running. Ergo, they must be left running. If you are just setting a temporary ‘out of office status’ and you don’t care that e-mailers get a repsonse only every couple of hours then if you start a program every couple hours (or that is your usual mail check interval) it should work.

The reason that most people say it is best handled by a server is the assumption that your PC will be off while you are ‘out of the office’. So, the response must then be sent by the server.

Joe

--Joe

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>assumption that your PC will be off while you are ‘out of the office’.
Ah! Thanks Joe. Now it makes sense.
I used to turn off (and unplug) the laptop. Now I leave it on.
So for me having a little task that tooled up every 6 hours would not be a big deal. I guess I’d be turning my laptop into a pseudo-server for the purpose of OOO.

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See responses from #5 and onwards in this chain – I think it pretty well answers your question. For a true Out of Office responder, it needs to be done at the server/ISP side, not the client side.

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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>See responses from #5 and onwards

Thanks Ed,
While I agree with #5 that Thunderbird can’t do it, I have to disagree with “This must be done by the server not the client.”, mainly because I always reason that the computer is only doing what i do – it’s just doing it faster.
I can’t see a reason not to make use of a device as outlined in my first post.

I agree with #7 “It is not a good idea to respond to spam messages with an out-of-office message “, which is why I contemplate powering the device with my whitelist&address book. I am, after all, primarily interested in satisfying my existing contacts.

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