Subject: RE: guidance (re: social event politeness)

From: "Book, Robert" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 13:38:41 -0500

Look, over a year ago, I was made painfully aware of the of the automated
vacation notice propagating emails to members of lists. It was never my
intent to inconvenience anyone by using the vacation notices function,
rather just the opposite. I'm an Outlook user as it's the corporate standard
on PCs and I would welcome information concerning any other mail package
that would interact appropriately with an Outlook Exchange server that would
include the capability to specify email ids which would be excepted from the
automatic response function. It is plainly evident that Microsoft considers
the inconvenience of the IETF, and other similarly organized groups, and the
resultant negation of the value of this feature as small potatoes. Just how
many lines of code and hours of testing would it take to make this a smooth
feature? Probably not as many as have been lost for all the people who have
had to deal the effluent.

-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Schryver [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 11:14 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: guidance (re: social event politeness)

> From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>

> Another common curtesy issue this thread has raised is vacation scripts...
>
> I've recieved 3 dozen or so responses from people on the mailing list who
> have automated vacation scripts. Please if you must use a vaction script
> on your mail either unsubscribe from the mailing list while you're gone,
> use procmail to filter your lists so they don't get caught by your
> vacation script, or just don't use vacation...

It's far from all vacation mechanisms that do the evil deed.  If you look
at the headers, you'll almost certainly find a telltale line of the form:

    X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (...

All ordinary submissions with that black mark should be rejected. 
All requests sent to IETF list control addresses should be interpreted
as unsubscribe requests.  This would not purge the lists of the
current abusers (those who insist on using that junkware and abusing
the rest of us), but it would reduce their proliferation and
encourage some to switch reasonable MUA's.

If the IETF doesn't try to enforce minimal standards where it
affects the business of the IETF, then the junkware vendors will
never bother to fix their junk.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]