Setting up an autoresponder for your emails for when you are away is relatively well documented but there are some additional things you need to do to ensure it works as you plan, otherwise you can get caught out.
1. The autoresponder loop
If you setup an autoresponder to simply reply to any incoming email with a ‘I’m away email’ then you can get caught in a loop if the sender has setup a similar autoresponder. i.e. I received an email from ebay, to which my autoresponder replied to say I was away, to which ebay replied that ‘my message was important to them’ or somesuch, to which my autoresponder replied to say I was away to which … you get the idea. I had set up various filters etc to keep my emails to the minimum so I could pick them up remotely on my iphone, where I was paying according to the volume downloaded. This loop generated an email about every other minute until I was ironically rescued from drowning in auto emails by:
2. The automatic update
If you forget to switch it off, Windows will automatically check for updates and install them, if that means a restart then your emails are no longer checked and the autoresponder doesn’t kick in.
These two both caught me out but a third which I DID manage to do but which I don’t see often mentioned is to ensure that your computer is set not to sleep after a certain amount of time.
Solutions:
1. It is unfortunately difficult to make this 100% foolproof as not all autoresponders reply with a copy of your original email, so you can’t simply check for a word used in your original email to stop the process. My best effort would be to create a rule which sits above your autoresponder, which checks for :
- a word (such as ‘autoresponder’ or whatever you have used in your reply)
- certain give-away addresses, such as ‘donotreply@’, ‘blackhole@’ etc
- any domains which you happen to know of which has this kind of receipt notification set up
If any of the above are found stop the system from processing any more rules, so it never reaches your autorresponse rule.
2. stop the computer from updating
Go to : control panel > system and security > windows update > change settings.
Change important updates to: anything except install automatically.
Note that this does pose a minor security risk but you can’t have your cake and eat it, just remember to turn it back on when you return.
3. stop the computer from sleeping
Go to : control panel > hardware and sound > power options > edit plan settings.
Change put the computer to sleep: never
These settings in 2 and 3 are for Windows 7.
thawte revisited
ah! after my last frustrated attempt to renew our thawte security cert I was pleased to receive an email from Thawte saying that I have to update my site seal and that this will remove the need in future to update the seal when renewing the certificate – so that’s good news.
Unfortunately we’re now looking to move hosts from Windows -> Apache and as a part of this I’m having to move the security certificate. Thawte have a ‘knowledge base’ article to help with this but 2 thirds of the way down it says ‘Run the following command using OPENSSL’.
Having been to openssl.org and made little headway I asked a thawte support rep for, well support. His response was that they support the cert but not third party applications. While on the one hand I can understand this, on the other if you are going to direct a customer down a certain route which they have no alternative but to go down you should not just wash your hands of it and say ‘good luck’ – or at least not if you don’t want to piss your customer off!