Action Files
• Introduction To Action Files
• Adding New Email Based Mailer Commands (Creating New Actions)
Introduction
to action files
As with most list
management software, various tasks can be performed by emailing messages with
various subject line commands to the mailer. These tasks are then processed
and the appropriate actions are taken.
The format for these
commands is usually:
Subject: COMMAND
Such as a subscription request (Subject: SUBSCRIBE)
Or
Subject: COMMAND:VALUE1 VALUE2
Such as a document request (Subject: GET-DOC:myfile.txt)
GroupMan
comes preconfigured with several common subject line commands, but also offers
the option for you to create your own subject line commands.
This is accomplished using action files. These action files
contain short scripts for each subject received.
Action scripts are simple text files and can be edited with any ASCII text editor
such as notepad or wordpad. The List Administration GUI also offers a simple
editor so that you can edit your scripts quickly and easily.
There should be 3
of these action files for every list you create. They are:
PUBLIC ACTIONS
FILE
The public
actions file should contain subject line commands that are available to the
general public. Commands such as SUBSCRIBE and HELP.
MEMBERS
ACTIONS FILE
The members action file should contain subject line commands that should only
be available to subscribers of the list, such as ADDFILE, REPOST, DIGEST-ON,
DIGEST-OFF, etc.
OWNERS ACTION
FILE
The owners
action file should contain subject line commands that are only available to
the list owner as well as all of the commands contained in the members actions
file.
GroupMAN will automatically decide which file to use based on the incoming message header information.
If you want to add a new action to one of the actions file, you would use the following format:
SUBJECT
{
ACTION|VALUE1|VALUE2|VALUE3
ACTION|VALUE1|VALUE2|VALUE4
}
Here are the parts broken down:
|
SUBJECT |
The command part of the subject line. If the subject were Subject: GET-DOC:myfile.txt This would be: GET-DOC |
|
ACTION |
This is one of the action commands. (See) |
|
VALUEx |
The
values to be sent to the action command. You can type in what you would
like these values to be or you can use any of the variables available
from the System Variables Table. |
Examples:
The following would look for the subject HELP and send out the help.txt file in your templates directory to the requestor.
Subject Line says:
Script is:
HELP {
AUTOREPLY|%From%|help.txt
}
In the next example, GroupMan looks for a subject line requesting a text document and mails it to the requestor.
Subject Line Says:
Script is:
GET-DOC
{
AUTOREPLY|%From%|%1%
}
Now let’s take the same example and send a separate confirmation as well as the document that was requested. We have stored the confirmation in a file in our templates directory called filesent.txt.
Subject Line Says:
Script is:
GET-DOC
{
AUTOREPLY|%From%|%1%
AUTOREPLY|%From%|filesent.txt
}