How to use macros

Macros allow you to automatically "customise" your taglines, signatures, etc. to the person you are writing to. Tag-o-Miga understands six macros -- the message's recipient's name, in three forms, the subject, the date and the time.

What Tag-o-Miga does is scan the tagline for a number of special strings, which are then replaced by the name, subject, date or time. As there is no established standard for the macros, the exact strings must be set up in the Prefs tool.

For example, if you set up the macros @N@ as name, @D@ as date and @T@ as time, then selected the following tagline:

    What were YOU doing @N@ at @T@ on @D@?

You might get:

    What were YOU doing Fred Bloggs 11:22:33 on 05/06/98?

If you want to use macros, you will have to reconfigure your OLR slightly. Not all OLRs support the changes we need to make so you may not be able to use macros.

The problem is that Tag-o-Miga doesn't normally know the message recipient's name or the message's subject. In order to find them out, it scans the message for the following special lines:

MSGTO: <recipient's name>
SUBJECT: <subject>

So you will need to modify your mailer to place the above two lines in your message. The exact procedure will vary between OLRs so you will need to consult your OLR's documentation. To give you an idea of the procedure below is instructions on how to configure Monsoon on the Amiga.

1. Start Monsoon
2. Select "Write headers" from the Preferences menu.
3. For each header, prefix it with the following:
   

   MSGTO: %T\\nSUBJECT: %S\\n

4. Click OK.
5. Select "Reply headers" from the Preferences menu.
6. For each header, prefix it with the following:
   

   MSGTO: %F\\nSUBJECT: %S\\n

7. Click OK.
8. Check each area to make sure it is using the new headers.
9. Quit Monsoon to save the new settings.