Some of BeezNest’s staff were having a hard time coping with requests for information from prospects, so we thought about how to improve the answering time without reducing the reply to an automated system that would just guess what type of answer it needs to do.

Using Evolution, the e-mail client and groupware desktop application for GNOME (Linux), we decided to ask one of our relations to develop a simple add-on feature for us that would be the result of our thoughts.

Well, it’s just got here and we really like it. Welcome the “Templates” plug-in for Evolution. The plugin has been developed by Diego Escalante from our specifications and you can just install it as a Debian/Ubuntu package and activate it in Evolution. From then on, a new directory called “Templates” is created in your main/local e-mail box. Feed any e-mail there and it will appear in the “Reply with template” menu when you right-click on an e-mail.

This template e-mail will be used as a reply to the e-mail you just right-clicked on, keeping the sender as a target and the title as it was (with a “Re:” prefix).

Furthermore, you can use %%sender_email%% and %%sender_name%% as special markers in your template. These will be replaced by the e-mail address or the name of the sender, as given in the original e-mail.

As our general politic to promote free software, we have decided to ask for this development to be open-sourced and we are even providing it to you here: .deb Evolution Template plugin