Send automatic reply - Issues

These issues are related to Send automatic reply feature in Virtualmin (Edit User -> Mail forwarding settings).

  1. I would change this text from "Yes, respond with message .." to "Yes, respond with message. Start it with if you want using html tags." In this way anyone will know about this feature without searching for documentation.

  2. When I get an auto-responder the message subject is formed by concatenating two strings: "Autoreply to" + "Initial message subject". This cannot be changed easy because is hardcoded. I suggest a small change to improve the functionality. Add in section two more fields, one for changing the default text "Autoreply to" and a check box to include or not the initial message subject name. Better than that you can use only one input text box allowing customization. Initial message becoming a variable. In this way you can make combinations as you need e.g. "{{variable}} - Auto-reply"

Thank you.

Status: 
Closed (fixed)
Virtualmin version: 
6.13
Webmin version: 
1.962

Comments

Good suggestions - I will add both of these to the popup help page for this field.

You can set a custom subject by starting the message with the line :

Subject: This is my reply to $SUBJECT

Status: Active » Fixed

Thank you for taking this into consideration.

My personal opinion is that one input text box will be fine. Changing subject of the autoreply is not easy to achieve for a newbie because it is hardcoded in /etc/webmin/virtual-server/autoreply.pl line 102:

$rheader{'Subject'} = "Autoreply to $header{'subject'}";

... but having an input text box and filling it up with text + variables gives the right flexibility.

A small note that html tags are allowed but they should be embed inside

html /html

tags.

For sure you had solid reasons not using postfix configuration for autoreply. Even this implementation is pretty basic it is very efficient. May I ask why you did not use postfix?

A small observation, files related to autoreply in /home/{user}/ and /var/virtualmin-autoreply/ are not deleted if "Send automatic reply" is unchecked . Is it OK this behavior? If you want them to remain in the file system you can load their content when checking the box again.

We have our own autoreply implementation because Virtualmin supports multiple mail servers, and we wanted to have consistent functionality across all of them.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.