v0.1.22 Auto Reply

[Klotar]

For the life of me, I cannot get the auto replies to work. I am an intermediate/advanced BB user and BCSS (certainly no expert but putting that out there as a start point). I am using a Bold 9000 on OS 5.0.0.411.

At first I thought perhaps just domain names were the problem, I was using a criteria of "@gmail.com" (without the quotes) and using a simple Canned Response that Auto Reply was pointing at. My test emails sent from gmail didnt seem to trigger an auto reply, so then I refined the criteria to [email protected] and tried it that way but that didn't work. I checked to ensure that Any criteria was used to match, was set for email, all permissions Allow and did a battery pull, etc.

I have used auto responders before (Antair) but was hoping to replace that with VT. Any suggestions?

[marwatk]

Hmm,

So you're using a 'From' 'contains' then '@gmail.com' as the only criteria? It's worth noting that it's configured to only send a single response per-user per-day as to not get in out of office wars with other mailboxes. Could that be what you're seeing?

-Marcus

[Klotar]

Hi, and thanks for the reply.

I didn't figure it out until this morning when I read your reply. Although I had the Match Criteria for the Match field as FROM, I left the Match type as IN instead of CONTAINS or ENDS WITH. It now works and have found that CONTAINS seems to work best for full email addresses and ENDS WITH works best with domains.

From a support issue perspective, I consider this closed -- thank you. I do have some questions though, I hope you can indulge me, as I plan to use the Auto Reply feature the most.

Q1: is there an order of operations when I have multiple Auto Replies active? That is, if I have a Generic Auto reply for all email where the From Ends With @domain.com, but I have a Custom Auto Reply # 1 for mail from contains joe@domain com and Custom Auto Reply # 2 for mail from contains [email protected]; then will an email from [email protected] get the Generic Reply or Custom # 2? Is this dependant on the top-down order that I have the Auto Replies set for, or do longer string matches have precendence over shorter string matches? Or, does Contains have priority over Ends With?

If it is a top-down priority order, I'd like to suggest an option to MoveUp or MoveDown the auto-replies so that I'd have joe and bob up top so that they get the custom replies, and then the generic one at the bottom to catch all others in the domain that are not joe or bob. Of course if there is already a different order of operations, I'd just be satisfied to know what order it is (e.g. contains > ends with).

Q2: in the examples and documentation, it mentions that it's possible to recognize the first name and insert it into the response. Sadly, I had deleted all samples/examples (mainly because I did not plan to use nested responses, etc.) and even re-installing does not bring the samples back so that I can see how to do it. Is there a certain variable (e.g. %T)? Oh, upon further reading of the documentation, this feature may only be for when editing a manual reply, not for an auto-response...?

I was looking for a "Hi [FirstName]!" to expand into "Hi Joe!" in an auto-reply. Is this possible? (Full name or even email address will be fine; less personal but fine).

Q3: you mentioned that to prevent out-of-office wars that the response is set for once per day. Good idea of course. Is the record of what emails were responded to persistent between reboots, or better yet, is the database of what was responded to "auto cleaning" after 24 hours? I am concerned with memory issues where a large volume of email may be auto replied to within a 24 hour period.

Q4: not directly related to the Auto Reply, but is the logfile cleared periodically (between reboots or every 24 hours)? Mine seems to be pretty big (probably not large in the KB/MB sense) and there seems to be no way to clear it or turn it off. Oh, I agree that the log is necessary for debugging and troubleshooting but if everything is working well, I hope that there might be an option to turn it off.

Q5: for Run on Start (and possibly Run on Event and Run on Schedule), would it be possible to have an option for each application chosen to "Start Minimized" or "Start in Background"? For example, I usually have Viigo autostart on bootup so that my articles are ready for me to read immediately instead of having to wait for it to start up and connect to servers, retrieve the articles, sort them, etc etc. If I use Run on Start to start up Viigo, it's "in my face" and has focus. While this may be desireable for certain applications and for certain users, it might not be desireable for everyone; so my suggestion, if doable of course, is to have the option to start minimized or in the background.

Allright, that's enough for today. Thanks for writing a great application. I purchased the application last night and am now running the latest version (1.0.2).

[marwatk]

Q1: is there an order of operations when I have multiple Auto Replies active? That is, if I have a Generic Auto reply for all email where the From Ends With @domain.com, but I have a Custom Auto Reply # 1 for mail from contains joe@domain com and Custom Auto Reply # 2 for mail from contains [email protected]; then will an email from [email protected] get the Generic Reply or Custom # 2? Is this dependant on the top-down order that I have the Auto Replies set for, or do longer string matches have precendence over shorter string matches? Or, does Contains have priority over Ends With?

If it is a top-down priority order, I'd like to suggest an option to MoveUp or MoveDown the auto-replies so that I'd have joe and bob up top so that they get the custom replies, and then the generic one at the bottom to catch all others in the domain that are not joe or bob. Of course if there is already a different order of operations, I'd just be satisfied to know what order it is (e.g. contains > ends with).

Hmm, the case of multiple matching replies didn't even occur to me. :/ Looking at the code it's going to work in top-down order, but it won't stop with the first match. It'll send all matching responses. I'll fix that tonight and put in 'move up/down' options. Thanks for letting me know.

Q2: in the examples and documentation, it mentions that it's possible to recognize the first name and insert it into the response. Sadly, I had deleted all samples/examples (mainly because I did not plan to use nested responses, etc.) and even re-installing does not bring the samples back so that I can see how to do it. Is there a certain variable (e.g. %T)? Oh, upon further reading of the documentation, this feature may only be for when editing a manual reply, not for an auto-response...?

I was looking for a "Hi [FirstName]!" to expand into "Hi Joe!" in an auto-reply. Is this possible? (Full name or even email address will be fine; less personal but fine).

Yeah, right now it's for manual replies only because it requires some user intervention to make sure it's got it right. (It's scanning the email for what it thinks may be right, but won't get it 100%). So in some cases you'd could end up with 'Hi [LastName]' or similar if their signature or name is weird.

Q3: you mentioned that to prevent out-of-office wars that the response is set for once per day. Good idea of course. Is the record of what emails were responded to persistent between reboots, or better yet, is the database of what was responded to "auto cleaning" after 24 hours? I am concerned with memory issues where a large volume of email may be auto replied to within a 24 hour period.

It's not using much memory, only a single integer for each 'from' you've received (and not even copying the 'from', it's using the same one in the email). So, for example, if you receive 10 emails from the same person, it's still only storing the single value for that person. It is wiped on reboot as well, so if it ever were to become a problem you can clear it out.

Q4: not directly related to the Auto Reply, but is the logfile cleared periodically (between reboots or every 24 hours)? Mine seems to be pretty big (probably not large in the KB/MB sense) and there seems to be no way to clear it or turn it off. Oh, I agree that the log is necessary for debugging and troubleshooting but if everything is working well, I hope that there might be an option to turn it off.

It actually wraps so when it gets 'full' (currently 10k max) it starts truncating the beginning. Shouldn't be too much of an issue, but I can add an option to disable it if you want. (Though probably not until the kinks get worked out).

Q5: for Run on Start (and possibly Run on Event and Run on Schedule), would it be possible to have an option for each application chosen to "Start Minimized" or "Start in Background"? For example, I usually have Viigo autostart on bootup so that my articles are ready for me to read immediately instead of having to wait for it to start up and connect to servers, retrieve the articles, sort them, etc etc. If I use Run on Start to start up Viigo, it's "in my face" and has focus. While this may be desireable for certain applications and for certain users, it might not be desireable for everyone; so my suggestion, if doable of course, is to have the option to start minimized or in the background.

Great idea. I'll add that in the next beta.

Keep the suggestions coming if you have any!

-Marcus

[Klotar]

Thanks Marcus. I have no disagreements with any of your responses and look forward to future releases. As for the Auto Replies, for the time being -- knowing now that all 'rules' will be executed from top down, possibly multiple times, is helpful and I can either compensate or allow a generic/global one to handle it instead of a custom one.

Thanks for considering some of these. Regards!