Answering machine on Pidgin

For Pidgin users who always online but not always infront of computer/notebook (went to meeting, lunch, praying, or maybe sleep :p ) there’s an interesting way to inform people that contact you via IM that you’re doing something else using something else than status message, something like an answering machine in Pidgin.

On telephone, answering machine will tell caller that you’re away (for some business perhaps) and politely tell caller to leave a message. For IM, answering machine will write a message to sender said that you’re away (or something else) and (could be made) politely send message to sender to leave a message.

That aswering machine is a plugin called Autoreply. It’s a part of  Purple Plugin Pack that you can download it here. To install it simply extract .zip package in Pidgin application folder in Program Files.

After installed, Autoreply should be appear in plugin list on Pidgin.

After you activated it, click Configure button to set some properties for Autoreply. For example i use my setting. I want autoreply run when my status are idle or away, so these two option should be enabled.

After that, i set autoreply to send a message “I’m away, just leave a message okay” with red font and “this is an auto-reply :” prefix. I also want autoreply stop running when i’m invisible (or i’ll be busted) so my setting should be like this.

Next, i want if someone persistently sending IM to me when i’m idle/away the autoreply will send message with 2 minutes interval and maximun 20 message count. Hence the setting should be like this.

If you’re content with your setting, just click Close button. You can change autoreply to send any text message as you like such as “I’m sleeping, please leave a message, i’ll read it on morning”

Try it and hopefully it usefull for you :-)