Subject: Re: Why the out of office messages aren't an example of misconfiguration.

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 19:25:09 -0700 (MST)

> From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>

> ...
>          The rule "if the recipient is not cited in the
>          message header To or CC (and if there is no BCC)
>          then do not sent an automatic response" embodies
>          the distinction between personal mail and bulk mail.
>
> It is a heuristic, but a good one. ...

Yes, and writing (reasonable) code is mostly a matter of obtaining
(mostly from other people) and codify good heuristics.

> And that said, it's clear we need a standard covering automated responses.
>
> THEN it will quite clearly NOT be a matter of configuration...

Besides the manual page for the open source, decades old `vacation,` which
probably was the inspiration for the "Internet Mail Service" out-of-office
notifications, there is page 7 of RFC 1894:

   The DSN MUST be addressed (in both the message header and the
   transport envelope) to the return address from the transport envelope
   which accompanied the original message for which the DSN was
   generated.  (For a message that arrived via SMTP, the envelope return
   address appears in the MAIL FROM command.)

It wouldn't hurt to have a dummy's guide for writing vacation programs
that spells out the obvious, such as the fact that an out-of-office
notification is an unsolicted, ad hoc DSN.  However, it wouldn't do
much good in a larger sense.  If writing down standards or good, common
sense heuristics made much difference, then there are many problems
could not exist, including not only this "Internet Mail Service OOF"
problem but also a bunch of embrace-and-extend problems in PPP that
happened after lots of writing in the IETF.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2001 23:49:43 -0500

> notification is an unsolicted, ad hoc DSN.

Having thought about this again as a result of the current discussion,
I would probably argue that it's closer to an unsolicited, ad hoc, 
automatically-generated, MDN (in contrast with an MDN that is manually
generated on a per-message basis).  The reason I would argue this is that
vacation notice isn't generated by the mail delivery system, it's 
generated by a user agent (or at least, something acting on behalf
of the user); and that it's an indication of recipient action rather
than of any action by the message delivery system.
 
However I would still argue that in the absense of explicit direction on 
the part of the sender, that a vacation notice (i.e. a notice that the
recipient's reading of the message will be delayed) should be returned
to the person who sent the message (Sender or Return-path field) rather 
than to the person or persons on whose behalf the message was sent (From).
Using Return-path would also be consistent with RFC 2298 recommendations
for automatically-generated MDNs.

Keith