Running a vacation-service with AutoShare 3.0.4

This is how I setup AutoShare 3.0.4 to handle vacations services for customers of our hosting service here at MIDRAS Internet Services in Munich, Germany.
Many thanks to Mikael Hansen for helping me in making this possible.

What is this?

A vacation-service is an eMail-based notification service. Any person mailing to an mail-account with an enabled vacation-service recieves an automated mail telling about the absence of the person.
An advanced vacation-service keeps track on the users mailed so that every person only receives one vacation notice and tries to determine wether a mail was sent by a user or an eMail-list or automated service of any kind, which will not receive the notice.
Vacation-services are a very nice feature for users, especially, if they can configure all the options including turning the service on and off by themselves.
In our solution, people can turn on and off the service or change the automatically returned vacation-notices. People need to response to a MailBack confirmation message for any command issued to the service robot, except they want the documentation for the features.

What you need - Setup

The way we did it, you need at least AutoShare 3.0.4 especially if you want the specific MailBack-Features.
Create a new account in EIMS called vacation. Make it "Save as Files" and point that feature to the configured "Filed Mail" folder. This way, you enable the file-specific MailBack option of AutoShare, thereby enabling AutoShare to directly return the documentation to the service if requested or in case of an error.
The setup that is a little bit easier to do includes pointing the vacation account to the "Hold Mail" folder. This way AutoShare issues a MailBack confirmation message for every mail someone sends to vacation@your.domain. This is not desireable. Therefore I recomend the first approach, pointing vacation to "Filed Mail".

You need to copy the supplied demo vacation AppleScript to the "process extender" folder of AutoShare. It is said that there is a memory leaking bug in the AppleScript-Application supplied with MacOS 8.5. To be sure upgrade to at least version MacOS 8.5.1.

Now you need to prepare the AutoShare Autoresponder-account "vacation". Create a folder called "vacation" in the "Documents" folder of your AutoShare installation. Inside this, you need text files named "default", "on", "off" and "MailBack".
The file named default contains the documentation to the service. How to use it, examples of what one can put into the notice and so on. Be creative. You might want to put a line like:

This changes the subject of the sent message to the line following the token.
The files "on", "off" and "doc" contain the messages sent to the user after a command was executed sucessfully. If you want the users to confirm that they really wanted to issue the command to the server, you might want to enable the MailBack confirmation message by placing a line containing /=mailback into any file you want the confirmation for.
The file "MailBack" contains the message sent to the user as the confirmation request. Make sure you include the original message.

You have two choices as to how the user should reply to the MailBack confirmation message. These have to do with were to place the unique identifier.
The standard procedure is to place this ID in the first line of the body of the mail. This way, a user has to reply to the automated message and usually has to delete some of the first lines of the reply (usually staring with something like "On xxx, yyy wrote:") so that the ID is again placed in the first line of the body of the reply.
I found that some users did not carfully read the explanation and just pressed reply. AutoShare will not accept this. On the other hand, I was not able to get Netscape Navigator to put the ID in the first line of the body. Netscape always adds something to outgoing messages that AutoShare treats as beeing part of the message-body.
Because of all this, I changed the MailBack behaviour to put the ID into the Subject and to expect it to be there as well.
For this to work you must insert a "J" to the Misc Stuff field in AutoShare-Admin.
To make this look more nicely, you might want to put something like /=subject Akk: MailBack confirmation required for key
AutoShare will add the ID after this line. Now a user just has to reply to the MailBack message without changing the subject. Even Netscape is able to do this!

Configuring User Accounts

To enable the usage of vacation services to any user, confihure a mail account in EIMS to "Save as files" combined with checking "Keep copies". This is essential as it enables the user to get his/her mails after the absence, otherwise, AutoShare will just eat up the mails.
Don't forget to create a folder with the users account name. I suggest placing a default "default" file there, because this will be the vacation notice mailed out until the user changes this (using the "doc" comand).

Using the vacation service

To use this system is easy for the users and the administrator after initial setup. Any function is triggered by keywords in the subject of mails sent to vacation@your.domain. Whereby placing "on" in the subject starts the sending of vacation notices to users, effectively initializing the list of users who already received the notice. "off" ends the sending of notices.
Something more special is placing "doc" into the subject of a mail. With this, the content of the message body will become the new vacation notice sent to users. You can even configure new subjects and other things by placing allowed tokens into the message.