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Customize email?


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10 hours ago, Don Lee said:

OK. I give up. Where is the documentation that tells me how/where I can customize the email reports on backups and the daily summary email? (which I really like on the Mac)

Right where I would expect it be, in this new (?) Knowledge Base article.  I found it by going to the Retrospect.com Knowledge Base page and doing a Find on "customize" in my Web browser, but there's a link to the article in the Release Notes for Retrospect Mac 14.6.  

It's been been decades since I did anything with HTML, but I gather that Retrospect will place the Header Template at the top of your generated e-mail, place whatever e-mail content it generates after that, and then place the Footer Template at the bottom—which is why the Header Template ends with an open <div> which is closed by the </div> tag that begins the Footer Template.  You'll probably at least want to customize what's between the <p> and </p> tags in the Footer Template.  Anything else you do with these templates is between you and your trusty HTML reference, and YM definitely MV.

If you're curious as to whether the e-mail clients you and your associates use support HTML e-mails, you'll probably want to look at this Wikipedia article section.  Take it with a grain of salt, especially with regards to Google Gmail, since the table doesn't seem to have been updated since 2013 and the entries seem to have been updated no later than 2011.  As to Windows Live Hotmail, clicking on that client's link takes you to a page which says it's been replaced by Outlook.com—for which there is no entry in the table.

Good luck, and don't forget to post in this thread what your results turn out to be.  Inquiring minds (but not mine; my "backup server" is in my bedroom, so I don't use Retrospect e-mail) want to know.

Edited by DavidHertzberg
Pointed out there's a link to the KB article in the Release Notes; Live Hotmail replaced by Outlook.com
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Thanks. I'll have to try the new header/footer. This is nice, but would be even nicer if it had some variables to plug in from Retro.

The marketing collateral also implies that I can customize the "daily email report", and I don't see any docs at all on that. The Mac daily report is easy on the eyes and helpful. The Windows engine generates something different, that looks like it was intended to be machine readable, and is much less helpful.

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I can feel the horns growing on my head for even suggesting this (insert appropriately-devilish smiley here), but if you want variables from Retrospect maybe you should be looking into script hooks.  saskia reported working on this back in July, starting with this post.  It would be only fair (my Boss reminds me that "fair" is not a concept we believe in down here) to tell you that she ended the thread by reporting in September that "Windows client backup events are only recorded when only part of a volume is tagged for backup. Client version appears irrelevant, same behaviour with the 8.2 and 12.5 clients."  And I know that, in your former persona of iCompute, you've been having your first fun encounter with Retrospect Windows.

Maybe you and saskia can work together on this problem, assuming you are not bitter competitors—with you creating some kind of e-mail-generating post-processor using as input the output her bash code generates.  Maybe her problem with script hooks is fixed in Retrospect 14.6/12.6, although there's no indication of that in the Release Notes.  And maybe it's going to freeze over down here.

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My thoughts exactly, although I was not aware of my "competitor" saskia.

Years ago, in a galaxy far away, I used to use Retrospect's script hooks, and as I recall, they were quite useful. It seems it is time to explore the new incarnation of those hooks.

I will, of course, report back.

P.S. "fair" is indeed a four-letter word. ;->

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FYI, Saskia reports that the bug (presumably with Windows client backup events) is fixed in Retrospect Mac 14.6.

P.S.: Later news: It's not fixed in the released version of 14.6, but she has a non-released  version in which it is fixed.

Edited by DavidHertzberg
Updated with later news that it's fixed in a _non-released_ version
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