Simple python script that connects to a mail server via IMAP and SMTP and replies to all emails in the inbox coming from a certain sender address using the Reply-To header. Mails that have been replied to are deleted afterwards.

This script runs on python3 and is written for the purpose of running as a cronjob.

To run it you'll only need python3.

To install, simply download a copy of the project (see screenshot below) and extract it to whatever folder you like.

Alternatively, on UNIX systems you can run

wget https://github.com/sunborn23/python-email-autoresponder/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip

to download and then extract all project files.

Before first run, you need to adapt the project to your needs by editing the autoresponder.config.ini file with a text editor.

The required configuration items for the individual sections are listed below.

Section [login credentials]

Section [mail server settings]

Section [mail content settings]

After configuring the project, you can run it manually to test if your configuration works.

For testing purposes you can run the script from the shell. To do so, navigate to the project directory and run

python3 run_autoresponder.py

If you want to run the script multiple times with different configurations on each executions, you can achieve that by running

python3 run_autoresponder.py --config-path /the/path/to/your/config/file/autoresponder.config.ini

For production use you can configure it as a cronjob.

From the shell, run:

crontab -e

Then append to the file (replace "/the/path/to/the/project/folder" by the actual path to these files):

*/1 * * * * python3 /the/path/to/the/project/folder/run_autoresponder.py

This will run the script every minute.

You can use any Online Cron Expression Generator for generating other cron expressions.

For info on how to craft the cron expression yourself, run man crontab.