When I first wrote this e-book, I only knew of one way to automate the delivery of your electronic products. That was to set up rules in your email program to automatically respond to Paypal emails. I still didn’t have my own domain. Now I own about ten domains and all the quirks I discovered dealing with the original automation technique can be cleared up through using the second and ultimate automation technique.
Using Your Email Program
I choose Outlook Express as an example in this chapter because it ships with Windows and I have gotten use to using it. Two other good free email programs that will work are Pegasus and Eudora. Pegasus is completely free and the free version of Eudora is adware. The process of setting either one up as an autoresponder is similar to Outlook.
Outlook Express
I will go into the full process with Outlook Express, because other software has similar options and it is probably the most used Email software.
Did you know you could set it up as an auto responder for your POP3 accounts? You can. This will not work for a Hotmail account, only for POP3 accounts, like the ones you get through your Internet Service Provider. There are also a few free POP3 account providers out there. A couple I have used is www.runbox.com and www.softhome.com. Or you can use a Yahoo address and get a program like YahooPops to make it act like a pop3 account. Just do a search for "free pop3 e-mail." If you have to break down and pay for a good POP3 provider, do so. They are really cheap and worth every penny when you find out what you can so with them and you will later.
It is good to have your auction files in order before you start. I have all my auction files in the My Documents folder of Windows and here is how the file structure looks
• My Documents
• Ad Copy--for finished auction ads
• Infopacks--packages I'm actively selling
• Ideas--works in progress
• Emails
• In Ad
• Paypal Respond
• Others
So you have your POP3 account now. How do you set up Outlook as an autoresponder? To set it up on autorespond, begin as if you were going to write a new message but leave the "to" field blank. As an example there is the text of my email below.
Thank you for purchasing Automated EBay Sales. The file is attached to this email. You will have to unzip it with winzip. Don't forget to leave me feedback if you like the product.
Thanks Stephan
Then I attached the zipped file to the email, select File-Save As and save the message as an .eml file and close the message.
Update – Due to the many viruses being attached to emails these days and the filters that automatically remove such attachments, a much better process would be to store your
products on your website and then send a download link in the email you save. Give your file a unique name that no one would guess by accident to prevent theft from internet surfers.
Then select Tools-Message Rules-Mail. When the menu pops up, there four steps. 1.Select Conditions for the rule. 2.Select the Action for the rule. 3. Rule description. 4.Name
of the rule. We will go through each step one at a time.
Lets say we have customers send us an email with the Subject line "More Info", after which we want to copy the file to the "Info" folder, and Reply with the email "Information for Free".
1.Select the Conditions for the rule
Here you choose what will trigger an action that you will choose later. So we check the box " Where the Subject line contains specific words"
2.Select the Action for the rule
Here we choose what Outlook will do with the message after it downloads it. So we check both "Copy to the specified folder" and "Reply with message."
3.Rule Description
Here we set the specifics for the rule. You will notice that as you checked the boxes above, the rule description box filled with info. In this example it should look something like this.
Apply this rule after the message arrives Where the subject line CONTAINS SPECIFIC WORDS Copy it to the SPECIFIED folder and Reply with MESSAGE.
First click on "contains specified words" and a new menu pops up. Type "More Info" in the box, click Add, and then click Ok.
Then click on "specified folder ". Choose "info" for the folder you want to save the message to, click Add and then click Ok.
Last click on "message". Now you will choose which saved email you want to respond to the message with. Pick the "Information for Free." email.
4.Name of rule
Last you get to save the rule under a name you will remember such as "Free Info Responder." And you are done.
Now when Outlook downloads the messages from your inbox, it will automatically save the message for you and reply to it.
You will notice, as you were doing all of this, that there were many options to choose from. Try then out. Play around a little. You will discover that Outlook is a pretty powerful tool.
Eudora
I had a chance to play around with Eudora and the features it has are great. You can set really specific rules for your autoresponder.
