The Automated Response Responder

I’m sick of get­ting auto­mated responses, I just don’t see the point. I don’t need an email telling me what I just did 2 minutes ago. Yes, I know, I was there too. So to that end I’ve inven­ted the Auto­mated Response Respon­der. That’ll teach the bastards.

First off, a few cau­tions: This is a bad idea, people don’t like it when you respond to their auto­mated responses, if they even notice at all. How­ever, this was — for me — more of an art pro­ject in the vein of Caleb Larson’s A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter (A sculp­ture that con­tinu­ally lists itself on eBay) than any real pro­gram­ming exer­cise. And now, on to the pro­ject itself.

You’re going to need Proc­mail for this. Proc­mail can be used to cre­ate mail-servers, mail­ing lists, sort your incom­ing mail into sep­ar­ate folders/files, pre­pro­cess your mail, start any pro­grams upon mail arrival or select­ively for­ward cer­tain incom­ing mail auto­mat­ic­ally to someone. Today we’ll be focus­ing on some vari­ation of that last one. Now, you’re going to need to install and set-up Proc­mail your­self (have I men­tioned yet that it’s a com­mand line tool?), I recom­mend Nancy McGough’s excel­lent Proc­mail Quick Start. Once you’ve got­ten that done you can get to my Proc­mail ‘recipe’.

:0
	check1 = "automated e-mail"
	check2 = "automated email"
	check3 = "automated notice"
	check4 = "automated message"

	*$ ! ^$MYXLOOP
	* B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4
	| (echo "From: you@domain.com" ;
		$FORMAIL -r -A"Precedence: junk"
		-A"X-Loop: you@domain.com" ;
		echo "This is an automated response
		in reply to your automated response.\n
		Please do not respond to this
		automated response.\n
		Thank you.\n"
	) | $SENDMAIL

Obvi­ously, the first thing you’re going to want to do here is to replace you@domain.com with your actual email address (on both occasions).

The actual code is quite simple. As you can see above, I have set up checks for the most com­mon word­ings in the body of auto­mated emails I have received, you can add, remove, or change as you wish. The next part — *$ ! ^$MYXLOOP — makes sure we’re not set­ting up an infin­ite loop here. The line after — * B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4 — simply cycles through the strings provided above and if any of them match sends the message:

This is an auto­mated response in reply to your auto­mated response.
Please do not respond to this auto­mated response.
Thank you.