Automatic email reply using Perl?

[StickyBit]

Folks,

When a recipient receives mail on my mail server, how can I send an automatic email reply back to the sender? Can this be done using Perl?

I was working for a company and had access to their Sendmail mail server. In the /usr/bin/alias file, I think I saw an alias name then a pipe to a perl script, when I asked what is this? someone told me that the perl script was an automatic email reply program for the recipient.

Is this a valid way to trigger automatic email replies? Please shine some light on this topic, if I can get a high level explanation on this process, I can create the code.


Thanks,

StickyBit.

 

[sleipnir214]

Sendmail (and qmail and others) has the facility to hand an email off to a program rather than just storing it in the user's mailbox. This is how mailing list managers such as Majordomo and ezmlm work. In fact, ezmlm, which works with qmail, is written in perl.

When configured to do so, the mail delivery agent can set certain environment variables and pipe the raw message to the app. It's really nothing more complicated than piping the output of one app to the input of another.

Without knowing which MTA/MDA you are using, it is difficult to advise you further. ______________________________________________________________________
Never forget that we are
made of the stuff of stars

 

[StickyBit]

My MDA is qmail-local; im running a qmail mail server although I could switch to sendmail.

Thanks,

Stickybit.

 

[StickyBit]

Any other solutions?

Stickybit.

 

[justice41]

You can setup procmail to do this. It will let you bounce messages and pipe to script filters.

jaa