[quote user="john knowles"]We have been happily and successfully using Pegasus for many years for our personal/home office and small business use. Is it possible to set up an Out of office auto reply in Pegasus or should that be done through our ISP?
[/quote]

Just to amplify a little on Peter's correct response... An automatic reply is only possible if the process that handles your mail is always running: this means that the computer where the mail is received must be turned on, and the software that processes it must be running on that machine all the time. This is quite a tall order for a mail client program (such as Pegasus Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird) and it's normally better handled by a mail server - the program that actually receives mail on your behalf and stores it until you're ready to read it.

Pegasus Mail's companion product, Mercury, has extensive support for automatic replies, even down to allowing you to set up rules that determine what type of reply should be sent based on the time of day, or day of the week.

Of course, you have to weigh up whether the small amount of extra configuration and maintenance involved in running your own mail server is adequately compensated by the extra control it gives you over things like this.

Cheers!

-- David --

We have been happily and successfully using Pegasus for many years for our personal/home office and small business use. Is it possible to set up an Out of office auto reply in Pegasus or should that be done through our ISP?

Such a message should be configured on your mail-server.

Thanks

It is, but it's kind of kludgy.  From memory, from the last time I set this up for someone:

1. Prepare a text-file VACATION.TXT with your desired autoreply

2. Create a new folder "Vacation Mail"

3. Create a Distribution List "No-Reply" containing all the mailing lists to which you are subscribed and those to whom you do NOT want to send auto-replies

4. Create the following new-mail filtering rules:

a. Scan list "No-Reply" -- if found, goto label SkipReply

b. Send text file VACATION.TXT

c. Move to folder "Vacation Reply" 

d. label "SkipReply" 

Note that there are no "smarts" here - if someone sends you 100 messages, they'll get 100 replies.  If you forget to add a mailing list to your No-Reply list, you'll spam it and probably get banned.

Also note that you have to leave Pegasus Mail running, preferably in non-preview mode and with the new-mail folder open, for the new-mail processing to happen.  I recommend changing the "check for new mail" timing from 900 seconds (or whatever you have it) to 86400 seconds (once every 24 hours) and resetting it back when you return.