Re: CalMail Vacation Messages

At 14:58 -0800 2005-01-28, Mike Friedman wrote:
>As one who is responsible for processes (SNS and CalNet) that initiate
>many automated messages to folks with CalMail addresses, I'm somewhat
>perturbed at how many vacation messages just contain fixed text in their
>subject lines. Which often makes it impossible to tell which mail they're
>replying to.
>
>I asked the CalMail folks if they could at least publicize the $SUBJECT
>variable on their web page (even if people aren't forced to use it). But
>the reply I received from them seemed somewhat confused and I got no
>answer to my followup question, so I'm not sure if the issue was
>understood.
>...
>Of course, I may be naive in assuming that CalMail even supports the
>$SUBJECT variable. Could someone at least confirm this?

   The following is from the online help for CalMail's webskins
<http://bert.berkeley.edu/calmail/webmail/help/calmail-webmail-help.html#filters-reply-macros>:

>Reply with [message text] Rule action
>
>The specified text is used to compose a reply message. The reply is
>sent to the address specified in the Reply-To address of the
>original message. If the Reply-To header is absent, the reply is
>sent to the original message From address.
>
>The header fields Subject:, Re: original message subject and
>In-Reply-To: original message-ID are added to the reply message.
>
>The specified message text can contain macro symbols that are
>substituted with actual data when a reply message is composed:
>
> * ^S is substituted with the Subject of the original message (in
>its original form).
> * ^s is substituted with the Subject of the original message (in
>the MIME-decoded form).
> * ^F is substituted with the From address of the original
>message (in its original form).
> * ^f is substituted with the From address of the original
>message (in the MIME-decoded form).
> * ^T is substituted with the Date field of the original message.
> * ^I is substituted with the Message-ID field of the original message.
> * ^R is substituted with the To field of the original message
>(in the MIME-decoded form).

   The locally-created interface to setting up a vacation message, at
<... calmail.berkeley.edu:50100/cgi-bin/forwarding/home.pl?... insert
session ID stuff here>, which is linked from most CalMail webskins,
doesn't appear to offer information about these macro symbols or a
link to the above help information -- assuming that these macros will
work in that context, that is.

At 15:13 -0800 2005-01-28, Mike Hunter wrote:
>I think it'd be good to have the default vacation message include the
>$SUBJECT (if $SUBJECT exists.) Does anybody think people would actually
>object?

   That's definitely also worth considering: a default subject line in
the form for the locally-created interface for setting up vacation
messages, which includes the ^S macro (or equivalent). Something
like:

   {Vacation text here} re your message: ^S

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

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Received on Fri Jan 28 15:27:13 2005