Web Sites and Ezine Design and Hosting
Auto-Responder Concepts
An auto-responder (responder) provides a predefined response to an Email inquiry. Use an auto-responder to provide standard information in response to Email inquiries.Email responders reply only once to a received Email. Standard hosting accounts include any number of Email responders at no additional charge.
Your response Email may contain plain text or HTML. To respond with a PDF or Word document, upload the document to your web site and enter a hypertext link to the uploaded document in the body of your Email.
Vacation Responders
Vacation responders have fewer options and are easier to set up.
Please see Vacation Autoresponders
Naming Your Responder
Your responder will have an Email address composed of a name that you choose, followed by the @ sign and your domain name.Example: info@mydomain.com
You might have a sentence on your web site saying "Please Email info@mydomain.com for more a free report."
Names are not case sensitive and you may mix upper and lower case for readability. You may also use hyphen, underscore, or period in the responder name (but no spaces or other punctuation).
Creating Your First Responder
If this is your first responder, please notify support@webvalence.com requesting that we enable autoresponders in your Email account. The support desk will create a "responders" account and setup a test responder for you.Then, follow the multi-step process below for your first responder.
Step 1: Login to your Email Admin Area
Responders are best maintained from the Email Admin Area. To find this, do the following
Go to http://mail.yourdomain.com:8010/
Choose "configure mail settings ...".
Enter Login Name: "responders"
Enter Password: Type your standard password
You see a page entitled "Accounts, Groups, and Forwarders..."
Step 2: Open the Responders Email Account
From the "Accounts, Groups, and Forwarders..." page:From the bottom left, choose "responders"
You see a page entitled "account responders@yourdomain.com"
Choose "Rules" from the second line center.
You see a form for "Rules", and it looks like the picture below. The rules page will normally include one rule called "info", which is there to provide an example of a responder called "info". Each new responder requires one new rule in the responders account.
Step 3: View an Existing Responder Rule
To get a picture of what a rule looks like, take a quick look at the one which has been created as an example for you.Select the "Edit" link next to existing rule named "info".
You see a page for the Info Rule. The page has two components. The top part contains the triggers that activate the rule, and the bottom part contains the actions that the rule takes when it is activated. Notice that the responder text is located in "Parameters" text area adjacent to a drop down menu for "Reply With".
Step 4: Create Your Own Responder
Select "Rules" from second-line center to return to the Rules page. Type your responder name (eg. "test") in the box labeled "Rule" and select "Add Rule ".
You will see a new line with the name of your test responder appear. Choose the "Edit" link to enter the details for your new responder.
The graphic below shows the parameters screen that will follow. To complete this responder, you will specify the triggers in the "Data and Operation" section and actions in the "Action and Parameters" section.
Step 5: Specify Your New Responder
Use your mouse and keyboard to make your screen look like the example below.Choose "Any To or CC" from the drop-down menu labeled "Data". Leave the "Operation" drop-down menu set on "is". Type the name of your responder (in this case "test"), followed by an asterisk in the "Parameter" box. This will trigger the mail system refer any mail sent or cc'd to your responder test@yourdomain.com to do the actions you specify.
Choose "Reply with" from the "Action" drop-down menu. Paste the contents of your responder in the text field labled "Parameters". Normally, this will be plain text prepared in a word processing program.
Select the "Update" button to save your entries!
Step 6: Elaborate on Basic Responder Rule
Choose "Human Generated" from the second "Data" drop-down menu. This helps ensure that your autoresponder doesn't reply to incoming spam, wasting resources and possibly creating a mail loop.Optional owner notify: If you want to be notified when this responder is triggered by an inquiry, choose "Redirect To" from the second drop-down menu under the "Action" heading and type your address in the Parameters box.
Choosing "Redirect To" sends the original request message to the specified address. To notify more than one person, enter comma separated addresses. If you don't want this notification, choose "Discard" from the second drop-down menu under the "Action" heading.
Then choose the "Update" button to save your changes.
Your result should look like the image below, assuming you decided not to notify the owner when the responder is triggered.
Step 7: Discard Action
Ensure that your rule ends with a "Discard" action. This will ensure that the incoming request is discarded following the autoresponse.Step 8: Last Step - Forwarding to the Responder
To summarize, you now have a responder account setup to reply to incoming messages from humans, with or without a notification to others.A forwarding address for the responder, such as "test@yourdomain.com" must be created to route mail to the responder. Create the forwarder as follows.
Choose the link to your domain from Top Center of the page. This returns you to the Accounts, Groups, and Forwarders..." page. Choose "Create Forwarders" as shown below.
From the Forwarders@... page, enter test in the left column and responders in the right column. Your result will look like the figure below. Be sure to remember to choose the "Update" button to save your work!
Testing Your Responder
From your Email program, send a message to your responder at your domain. For the example, above, the address would be "test@intuitivecoachingsolutions.com". You should receive a response shortly.
Updating Your Responder
You may update your responder at any time. Log into your Mail Admin account, choose the responders account, the rules button, and "Edit" the rule corresponding to your responder. Modify the text in the "Parameters" box and select the "Update" button to save your changes.
Adding More Responders
Your WebValence account allows you to have an unlimited number of responders. To add a responder, log into your Mail Admin account and repeat the instructions that you performed to create the test account.Optional Responder Customization
Responders may be further customized for special situations. By default, the subject of response message mirrors the sender's subject. You can customize the subject.Reply-With Customization
You may modify the message in the reply-with action box to achieve custom results.If the reply-with content starts with the plus sign, "+", lines preceding the first blank line are expected to be message headers. If you use this message construction, we recommend that you always specify the Subject, the Mime-Version, and the Content-Type headers as shown below.
Specify the Subject: Whenever you use the plus sign construction, you should specify the subject. Type it like the following.
Carbon Copy the Owner: You could also specify that the response be carbon copied to the owner. Normally, this would be in lieu of redirecting the sender's original mail, as shown above.
Send an HTML response: You could also use the message headers to send an HTML response. Note that your message text must be correctly composed HTML.
