A friend and I are throwing a puzzle hunt for some friends and family (it’d kinda be similar to the BANG and a mini-mini-version of The Game). All of our puzzles solve to a single word, which we then want the teams to text Game Control in order to get their next location. I’m using Bluehost as my server (a shared hosting environment).
I can use their filters (intended for spam) to accomplish what I want, by examining all mail coming to my domain, looking for the solution words in the text, and then redirecting the mail to an email account created for that specific code word. That corresponding email account is then set up with an autoresponder that sends back the necessary location information. While this works, a) it’s a pain the butt to manage; b) it examines all mail, not just email sent to Game Control; and c) there’s more complex things I’d like to do.
I was hoping, therefore, to find a way and/or some software that would basically work on my BlueHost server as a large “if-then-else” check: If email is going to game control and body contains “rhino” then respond with location x text; else if body contains “slippery” then respond with location y text; etc. It would also be nice to be able to send timed responses: If 15 minutes have passed since last checkin, send query.
I still haven’t found anything and our game is only a few days away. All the commercial autoresponders are for either mailing lists or customer support.
I’m kinda surprised that I haven’t been able to find something as simple as “I received an email with text ‘blah’ so I’m sending back ‘blahrelatedtext’” yet. Maybe I’m looking for the wrong thing?
(If you want to get an idea of what I’m talking about, you can try the sample puzzle that I put up to give our players a taste of what they’d be doing.)
If you’ve got Microsoft Outlook, setting up rules for this are pretty mindless. The one snag might be that it’ll be on your PC, rather than the server (unless you can afford Exchange)
As I can envision it - BlueHost gets all the inbound mail. You tell it to route all messages to rottenroot@yourdomain to the PC. Outlook on the PC picks them up and the rules might be like:
Apply this rule after the message arrives
with game in the subject
and with the answer in the body
reply using <a specific template>
and stop processing more rules
The template would be a .oft file - you create those by typing up the response as if it was a normal email, then select Save As… to get a box to give it a file name and pick the .oft template file type.
I don’t think there’s a way to have the rules work in reverse - there’s no “without <text>” option (at least not on the version I have here), and there’s no “it’s been 15 minutes, ask how they’re doing” ability.
Since your web hosting provider allows secure shell access to the server, you could set up an autoreply system using procmail. Example procmail recipes can be found on the manual page.