autoresponder-like question

David P. Schwartz plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Sun, 03 Feb 2002 01:33:14 -0700


I send out some reports attached to emails each
week.  Invariably, a few people complain that they
can't open the attachment and they need me to
re-send it.  It's really a major PITA!  I'm
looking for some solution that can handle these
sort of requests without administrative
intervention on my part.

Here's one idea I've got.  To put some meat on the
example, suppose I'm sending out a new recipe each
week in an email, and there's an attachment with
some related stuff in a ZIP file.

So, let's say there's an email address added to
each distribution list that goes to a "bucket",
eg., backuplist.recipe@thedomain.com (maybe a
regular POP3 mailbox is fine).  Then, when people
can't read an attachment, they'd simply send a
request to another email address (eg.,
resend.recipe@thedomain.com) specifying the name
of the desired recipe's file attachment (or recipe
name) in the subject header.

At the other end, "something" would intercept all
emails addressed to a users matching the pattern
"resend.*@thedomain.com" and search through the
emails in the bucket (or mailbox) for one that
contains the specified attachment.  If found, it
would be sent out to the sender's email address.
If not, an error mail would be sent back along
with a list of all the files it DID find.

A bonus feature would be that it checks the
request to be sure that the sender's email address
is contained somewhere in the header of the mail
containing the attachment.  That way, only people
who are on the distribution list could ask for
files to be re-sent.

Does anybody know of anything that behaves
remotely similar to this?  Or that handles this
problem in a different way?

TIA!
-David