E-Mail Hints and Tips
If you move practice or are going to be picking up your e-mail from a different account why not forward all the mail to your new address?
It does not matter what you use to read your mail (elm, mutt, Windows Outlook etc) you can get the system to automatically send any incoming mail elsewhere.
- Login as yourself and get to a $ or Vet> prompt.
- Type
cd - Edit/Create a file called
.forwardwith your favorite editor - Add to it one line with the address the mail has to be forwarded to.
If you still want the mail to appear in your Unix mailbox (you may want
to send a copy to your home computer), just include the local address
as well e.g.
tom@my.home.account,tom
Note: You can also us the Premvet options:
Menu -> = -> User -> Setup -> Mail Forwarding
To save you having to do the 1st 2 steps - just enter your address.
If you are using 'EnServe', click the 'pref' icon and in the 'Forward mail to' box enter the mail address to send to.
For some unknown (to me anyway) reason people want time off from checking their e-mail and send a silly 'I'm out of the office till xx' type message. How do they do that?
This is handled by the 'vacation' utility supplied as part of sendmail (the
Unix mail handling program) and is rather simple to setup.
Get to a $ prompt and:
- Check that vacation has been installed by typing
type vacationit should respond with
vacation is /usr/bin/vacationvacation not found' then you will need to get it from your OSR 5 master CD (it's in Unix Mail -> Sendmail). Once you install it run the command/usr/utilities/smail.confto re-create some links. - Use any editor and create/edit the file in your home directory
called
.forwardand make sure it contains:user, "|/usr/bin/vacation user"where user is your login name e.g. in my case,
tom, "|/usr/bin/vacation tom" - Initalise the vacation database by typing
vacation -i - Create your message in a file called
.vacation.msge.g.Subject: On HolidayI am on holiday till the 3rd January, if it is urgent please phone 1234 or mail support@premiervet.com.
Thank You etc. etc.
People will receive one automatic reply (it does not matter they have mailed you 100 times or not). You will still have a copy of the message in your mailbox so you can reply when you are back.
When you come back from holiday to switch off the vacation utility just
remove the .forward file e.g. rm .forward
box enter the mail address to send to.
If you are using 'EnServe', click the 'pref' icon, tick the 'Auto Reply' box and enter the details in the text boxes.
Do you get confused with mail addresses, do you wish it was easier to mail the branch surgery, send mail to just the Vet's or just the reception staff. Well it is easy to do.
This does not depend at all on the mail reader you are using, each mail reader will have an addresses book or their own way of handling multiple addresses but that depends on the user setting them up. !!
There is a global file (/usr/lib/aliases) that the mail software
will check each time e-mail is sent or received. You can add to
this any practice aliases you want.
The format is simple, one line per entry and the line starts with the alias name, a colon then the addresses.
Some ideas:
- You want to mail the branch but can't always remember the name.
add:
branch: vet@patleyNow just
mail branchand the address will be expanded automatically. - All the vets at the branch
bvet: tom@patley, lee@patley, fido@patley - Aliases work for both sending and receiving, you could setup all your
local staff e.g.
all: tom, lee, jennifer, jamie, james, aileen etc. etc.so any mail addressed to '
all' will go to everyone. Rather than have the remote site specify all your users just tell them to mail, for example, staff@machine and you have an alias for staff at your end. That's how our 'support' address works.