Vacation Service Template 1.2

What is a vacation service?

A vacation service is a responsible, intelligent autoresponder for a personal e-mail account. This kind of service is used for people who gets a lot of mail or for times when someone will not be answering e-mail for an extended period.

How do I use it?

Before you leave

Forward all mail from your normal account to the vacation service on the ListSTAR machine (one vacation service required per person). You may want to change the autoresponse so it includes when you will return.

While you're gone

Mail sent to your normal account will be forwarded to your vacation service on the ListSTAR machine. First, every message is filed in the "While you were gone" folder located within your vacation service folder. If the message is not from a mailing list and this is the first message received from that address, a automatic reply is sent. Only one message will be sent to any one address.

When you return

When you get back, your mail will be waiting for you in the "While you were gone" folder located within your vacation service folder. Enable the rule "Leave this rule disabled" and prepare a message informing everyone that you have returned. Send it to yourself, which will cause it to be forwarded to your vacation service. The vacation service will reflect your message to everyone who wrote to you while you were away. Set things back to normal by stopping the forwarding of mail to your normal account, and clearing out the "Vacation Sender List" address list.

Installation

To make a new vacation service, take the following steps:

  1. If you haven't already, read about importing templates
  2. Launch the ListSTAR Server
  3. Choose "New Vacation Service..." from the "Scripts" menu
  4. At the prompt for the listmaster's email address, enter the address where mailer-daemon mail and error messages should be sent. This address is automatically entered into the "Listmaster Address" address list if it doesn't already exist there.
  5. At the prompt for the address and display name of "Vacation Service", enter the user's e-mail information (normal address and name).
  6. At this point ListSTAR will be busy for a few moments as it duplicates files and imports them into ListSTAR. If your Services window is open, you will see "Vacation Service", appear in alphabetical order. When this is finished, a dialog will appear reporting exactly how many services, address lists, and AppleScripts were created.
  7. The new template is now created. You should rename the new services and address lists. In most cases, you can just replace "Vacation Service" with "Your List Name" as appropriate. The names are not themselves important; it is just important that the names are unique and easily identifiable.

Requirements

Support Issues

If you have any questions or problems with these templates, join the ListSTAR-Talk mailing list on the web or by sending a message to liststar-talk-request@liststar.com with the word "subscribe" in the body of the message.