automating email responses with python

[William Park]

Sandy Norton <sandskyfly at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I have a terrible problem responding to emails in the 'expected' time
> frame. I think I'm always late (whatever that means) and I usually
> have to apologize for responding non-immediately. So... I've been
> thinking about an application, written in python of course, that would
> preprocess one's emails and do some of the work that one usually does
> prior to responding.
> 
> Here is a silly example:
> 
> I receive an email that is essentially a request for a document of
> some sort... my preprocessor somehow understands this and parses the
> email to a set of elements (one of which is a document), it
> preemptively searches my harddrive for the document and then composes
> an appropriate response with the assumed document as an attachment. I
> then accept the respone as is, or do a minor tweak to make it
> suitable.
> 
> Is this a something that can be addressed with software, or should I
> just focus on my response time...
> 
> cheers to all,
> 
> Sandy

Well, you can run an "autorespond" script from Procmail as when an email
arrives.  As far as composing the content for you, you can send out
reply with search results and fixed text descriptions.  But, my general
advice is take shorter coffee breaks.  :-)

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
Linux solution for data management and processing.