That old saying is quite true: things will get worse before
they get better. Last night's performance of this nasty flu
had me in critical condition, but when I woke up this
morning all traces of that beastly bug had vanished. This
miracle healing came at just the right time, as I was
beginning to let my e-mail correspondence slip by the
wayside.I did have a bit of fun with faking things for a while, with
a bit of help from a creative auto responder program called
aargh, or Another Auto Responder Gone Haywire. If you've
ever received a reply along the lines of "Hi, I'm on the
vacation until the 23rd of the month," in return for a
message that you sent, then you've seen an auto responder at
work.
Most auto responders are single-minded, handing out the same
information to anyone who sends you a message but this might
not be ideal for your needs. aargh uses the power of Linux
and procmail to automatically respond to e-mail coming from
a particular address. For example, you might want to respond
to all messages from boss@example.com with "I'm not
available" and all messages from cutiepie@example.com with
"How about dinner and a move tonight? Call me."
I'll bet you saw the mention of procmail in the previous
paragraph and recoiled in horror. Never fear, because all
you need to do is make sure that procmail is enabled and
running on your Linux box. When you run aargh, the program
will ask you a few questions, and then take care of all the
procmail modification needed to start churning out custom
auto responders as soon as possible.
This program might come in handy for corporate users. One
person I know uses it in his business to inform co-workers
and preferred customers of his latest contact information.
You can even choose not to deliver any auto response at all
to certain e-mail addresses, so that those who don't need to
know never will. There are plenty of uses for aargh; it's up
to your imagination to discover all of them.
Linux 
