email auto-responder

[Clemens Hermann]

Hi Cameron

thanks for your reply!

> Help us understand.  I generally think of autoresponder
> technology in terms of the mail transfer agent and mail
> delivery agent involved--sendmail and procmail, 

yupp, almost everything I found concerning the issue is dealing with
this situation but my starting point is different.

> Or are you saying you have an existing mail 
> user agent (POP3-based, perhaps?)--a client--that you 
> like, and you want to beef it up with Python to create
> an autoresponder?

yes. I get the mails via pop3 and getmail
http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/getmail-2.0/ which is also
written in python to read them with mutt later.
So I can not do it the "mta way of autoresponding" because the
envelope sender has gone yet. I know this is everything but ideal but
the only opportunity I have (imho) is to respond to the header-from
addresse. I have written something in perl but because of my limited
programming capabilities this turned out to be an unreliable and buggy
solution and it that turned out furthermore that I don't like perl
that much :).

The planned autoresponder gets the mail (without envelope) on standard
input, extracts the from, subject, etc. Then a response to the header
from addresse is generated and locally injected.

> If Unix is hosting your mail service, it's quite likely
> that the MDA will be the easiest point for you to insert
> autoresponse capabilities.  

As I avoid smtp re-injection after polling mail via pop3 there is no
MDA involved at all.

> What MDA do you use now?

On the ISP machine there is running qmail but I only get the mails
_after_  getmail has fetched them via pop3.

At the moment I am not able for example to have a special addresse or
subject where peole can send mails to automatically get my gpg key.
I have searched Mark Lutz's Python reference but even there I could
nod find a starting point.

thanks for your help

/ch