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E-Mail Addresses

All you staff have their own E-Mail account(s), you have a set of aliases you add to your stationary and web site e.g. Office@your.domain, Sales@your.domain, Enquiries@your.domain etc. This ensures that received mail is directed to the correct person or department.

This works well for published addresses, however, all staff have access to E-Mail and in most cases it is set to individuals e.g. JohnS@Your.Domain, Smith_John@Your.Domain etc. for John Smith. This is fine for personal main sent by John, it will be From him and replies will be directed to him. What if John is a member of the Office Admin staff and if John is ill no-one checks is mail, off on holiday same applies, unless John has remembered to add (cc Carbon Copy) others and the recipient has also remembered to include others that mail sits in Limbo.

Most of the mail relating to the practice will be sent via the Vet System. In these cases, you can get the system to automatically adjust the tags (Headers) of the mail so you can have a 'corporate' or 'Group' address and set the Reply-To tag so replies automatically are re-directed.

This has the advantage as its:

At the top of each mail message there are 'Headers', these are lines that are usually hidden from you as a user that directs the E-Mail. The headers you will be familiar with as the From: To: and Date: entries.

The From: header is usually set to your Unix Login Name, but can be over-ridden. There are other headers that can be changed, the procedure is the same.

There are two things you can do:

  • The From address can be set to the actual user (Tom)
  • The Reply To address (if anyone replies to it) is set to Admin
    • or
  • The From address can be set to the group (Admin)
    • In the 1st case, the sender name is there as point of contact but any replies are automatically sent to the group. In the 2nd example, unless the user specifies their name in the body it's pretty anonymous.

    Whatever, method you pick the procedure is the same.

  • From the menu press F6 to get the Vet> prompt

  • Use the editor of your choice (ste, ne, pico, vim etc) and edit common.tcf e.g. ste common.tcf

    Add to this 

    EMAIL="The Admin User <Admin@Your.domain>"   ; export EMAIL
REPLYTO="Happy Pet Team <admin@your.domain>"  ;export REPLYTO
ORGANIZATION="Your Practice Name"  ; export ORGANIZATION
    Type exit to get back to where you were, now exit and go back into the Vet system for those changes to take place.

    Of the lines all are optional, if you want to just have a ReplyTo entry then you just need the REPLYTO line, if you don't want to add an Organization line - leave it out.

    The EMAIL line will be used as the sender address, the REPLYTO will be added as the address all replies come to and ORGANIZATION is a header that a lot of people use to filter spam and indicates it is an official mail.

    The 'common.tcf' file will apply to ALL users of Premvet, you can limit this by using one of the other start-up file. Support can help you decide what would be suitable.

    You can also exclude people from that, lets say the senior clinician Gary does not want his mail changed. In that case if he uses the same procedure as earlier but use ste $HOME/user.tcf and to this file adds 

    unset REPLYTO EMAIL
    then the ReplyTo and From lines will not be altered.

    The same applies if you have an account that is used by a group, you can have different mail addresses as well. Use the ste $HOME/user.tcf file and add the EMAIL, REPLYTO lines etc.

    Up to now we have assumed that the mail will be generated via an option within Premvet. The same goes for non-premvet use, if you want to adjust YOUR email address or you want all replies going somewhere else add the lines to the file $HOME/.profile.