Out of Office Auto Reply Message - Scheduling by Day of Week

[julieathps]

We have employees who are on 4 day work weeks and/or part time. We want to set up Thunderbird Email to autoreply only on certain days of the week, eg, every Friday or whatever, so clients know who to contact if needed in their absence. If they aren't auto scheduled, our human employees will forget to turn the message on and/or off when they are back in the office. Can anyone help with this? Thanks a bunch!

Thunderbird version 31.4.0
Windows 7 Pro V6.1 Build 7601:Service Pack 1

[Daifne]

Moving to Thunderbird Support

[tanstaafl]

There is a "reply with template" action in the message filters that you can use with a POP account. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/set-mozill ... ed-emails/ gives an example of how to use it. I don't understand why IMAP accounts don't support it.

However, I don't know of a easy way to auto-schedule it since the message filters don't explicitly let you test the time or day of the week. Its limited to date and age in days. The FiltaQuilla add-on adds many features to message filters but doesn't seem to help with this type of problem. I haven't used the Lightning add-on for years, but I don't remember it adding the features you need. The reason I thought about it is because it supports tasks and calendars.

I suggest you talk to the mail server admin about them writing a simple server side script to automatically enable a out of office reply. I wouldn't try to solve it using Thunderbird.

http://mesquilla.com/extensions/filtaquilla/
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers

[mgagnonlv]

If you want to use it, the "reply with template" also work with an IMAP account. The key, at least with the most recent versions of Thunderbird, is that it works only once you have saved at least one template. I used it once and I don't remember if it works better when the "Template" folder is synchronised or not synchronised with the server.

Four caveats (whether you are in POP or IMAP):

1. You need to set up a rule. So something like "all that is not junk" is a valid rule.

2. Use this filter after you have filtered junk mail; otherwise, all junk mail senders will receive a confirmation that your email is valid.

3. There is no way you can limit such "on holidays" message to, say, once per day or only once per address. So imagine the shouting match between your computer and your correspondent, also on holidays; both computers would email themselves back and forth that they are on holidays! You need to include some kind of exclusion rule like "don't reply if subject contains 'Out of office'".

4. Finally, the biggest drawback to this approach is that it only works when Thunderbird is running.


Other approaches ?

– In theory, the IMAP protocol is supposed to have a variable or header that one could use to trigger an autoresponse from the header. Problem is: it's hardly implemented.

– Some ISPs and web hosting companies offer a "on holiday" message in their webmail interface. As a bonus, it works all the time. Gmail has it under "Preferences".

– If your company is large enough, you may have an Exchange server.