Automatic Reply - add timing & repeat pattern

Ahh, thanks Jamie - There are so many things you can do in Virtualmin sometimes it's easy to miss where and how!

As for the second bit - setting up a recurring schedule for an auto reply in a cron-like way - is there any chance this could be considered for a future release? I'd envisage that it could simply be a weekly repeat pattern, with the days of the week you want the auto reply active to be selectable.

Hope you might be interested? :-)

The emails sent to the virtualmin domain user would still land in their mailbox, and a reply would get sent to the sender - as you would expect when an auto reply is normally set up. The difference I'm suggesting is being able to schedule the turning on and off of the auto reply message.

A Use Case would be someone (like my client) who works every weekday apart from Tuesdays. If she could schedule an auto reply to automatically switch on every Tuesday, and off again on the Wednesday, this would save some time.

Hope that makes sense?

Cheers Steve

True. I suppose in the Use Case I gave above, a sensible time for an Auto Reply to switch on would be when she leaves work the day before her day off - say at 1800hrs. Then anyone sending her a message from that point on would know not to expect a reply for 36+ hours.

Without trying to make it over-complicated, I suppose the main elements could be:

Start Date / Time End Date / Time

Repeat Pattern: Daily, Weekly, Monthly (I figure that yearly is unlikely to be useful)

Daily would not be selectable if the Start and End Datetimes spanned more than 24 hours. Weekly would not be selectable if the Start and End Datetimes spanned more than 168 hours (1 week) Monthly would not be selectable if the Start and End Datetimes spanned more than 672 hours (4 weeks)

After creating this reply repeat pattern by hitting Save, the UI could then show the user when, over the next period their replies will be switched on. E.g. show the next week for Daily repeat, or show the next month for a weekly repeat pattern, or even show a year for monthly repeats.

In those fringe-case 5-week months, I guess the user could set up one extra auto reply for that single week.

Which leads on to two challenges (I don't like to think of them as "problems"!): 1) It would be good if the user could hit "Duplicate", to copy over the most recently set reply message (something I suggested before, here! https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/tutorial/how-to-create-email-au... ) 2) It would be great if, when they set a new reply, they weren't able to have two auto-replies overlapping in terms of activation times... ;-)

Of course, considering how much stuff you've developed in Webmin/Virtualmin over the years, you probably have a much better idea than I as to what would work well!

Thanks for listening.

I suppose another "repeat" pattern should be "Once only".

I'm sure it wouldn't hurt Virtualmin/Usermin to be better than Outlook or Gmail at this ;)

Thanks for pointing out a method that can be used to generate an auto reply based on date/time. The only problem is, you would have to start setting multiple rules to cover multiple days, unless you're particularly gifted with regexs...

At the level of user I'm working with (office workers), they simply wouldn't bother trying unless the interface was simple to understand and use.