Re: [Evolution] my 1st impression & what's missing

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 19:51 -0800, Scott Richards wrote:
> As an automaticly generated reply such as:  Out of office, Holiday
> notifications, and 'Thank you for your Interest, We'll get back to you
> later' responses.  

I never thought it had that (I was talking about templates, which
something else).

There are two ways one could implement auto-response:

1) Within Evo itself. However that requires that Evo be always running.
This is unlikely, especially when people are out of the office. In fact
they are quite likely not to be logged in (so evolution-alarm-notify
won't be running either). In many cases the computer will even be turned
off.

2) On the mail server. This is how it's traditionally been done in the
Unix world. Here the problem is that the user needs access to the mail
server to set it up. But Evo's only knowledge of the server is related
to the protocols it supports (IMAP, POP etc.), none of which have
operations for setting up autoresponse. For a mail server to which the
user has login rights, this may be feasible, but the user has to
actually log in and do it himself, outside of Evo. If he can't do that,
tough.

In fact there is a third way: set up a filter to pipe incoming mail to
an external program which does the autoresponse. This is left as an
exercise for the student :-) (and of course you have to leave Evo
running permanently for it to work, meaning you'll have problems with
the freshness of messages on IMAP servers if you want to check them from
some other client).

poc