AutoReply Bot

A maubot plugin for auto-reply bots.

How it works

This plugin is specifically designed around the use case of a work auto-responder. I wanted a bot to automatically reply to tell people I'm out, and optionally providing them with some contact details for urgent matters, if someone DMs me on my work Matrix account while I'm on holiday. When I come back, also want a summary of the DMs in which I've missed messages.

In summary, a bot running this plugin allows you to:

set your status to away/not away (to turn the auto-responder on and off)
have a reply automatically sent to active DMs while away (once per DM)
have a summary of the DMs that have been active while away when coming back

See the demo below for a better perspective on how it works:

autoreply-demo.mp4

Installation and configuration

You can install this plugin in your maubot instance using the .mbp file from the latest release.

Then create a new client in maubot, connected to your own account (so it can send replies from it). Make sure to turn "Autojoin" off otherwise the bot might join new rooms and DMs on your behalf while you're away. Also make sure to set the display name and avatar URL for the instance to disable, otherwise maubot will change or remove the profile for your account.

You can then proceed to create a new instance with the client you have just created, and the plugin bzh.abolivier.autoreply. Feel free to edit the configuration as you like. All keys in the configuration example are required, and omitting one will cause the plugin to malfunction.

Once the instance is running, the bot will automatically create its management room, which is the room to use to tell it when you're away and back.

Note: This plugin is meant to run on a maubot instance you control. This is because by enabling it on your own account you are effectively giving it full access to your account, including your end-to-end encrypted messages.

Usage

Interacting with the bot is done via the management room that is created when the instance is first started. The following commands are available:

!away marks you as away and turns the auto-responder on.
!back marks you as not away and turns the auto-responder off. It also outputs a summary of the DMs that have been active while you were away.

Troubleshooting

I have accidentally left the management room

Right now there isn't a built-in recovery method for this. There are however a few ways to make maubot recreate the room for you:

delete the instance running the auto-reply plugin, and re-create it
click "View database" in the instance view, then in the query input write: DELETE FROM autoreply_management_rooms WHERE user_id = 'MATRIX_USER_ID' (replace MATRIX_USER_ID with your full Matrix user ID)

The first method is much simpler and less convoluted than the second one, but also means you will have to manually restore your configuration. So chose whichever works best for you.

Develop

This project uses poetry for its dependency management, so the first step is installing it (preferably via pipx):

pip install --user pipx
pipx install poetry

Then clone this project and install its dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/babolivier/maubot-autoreply.git
cd maubot-autoreply
poetry install

See the maubot documentation for plugin development.