Subject: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

From: CARDOSO Jorge Miguel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 14:40:03 +0100

Hi,

I think this topic started somewhere because of my "Out of Office AutoReply"
emails.
Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i
deactivated this function remotely.
Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have
always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its
necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is
usefull.

I can sugest something logic: 

- since the tool for filtering "Out of Office AutoReply" on the origin will
not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users
using "Out of Office AutoReply", the smart mailing-list mail-server should
apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be
always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".

so,
the rule would be: if subject field starts with string "Out of Office
AutoReply:", the mail is dropped else proceed.

regards,
j0rge card0s0

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From: Gene Gaines <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 10:22:01 -0400

j0rge,

But, that might filter some "Out of Office AutoReply" messages
that are intended for me.

A more general solution would be to look for header fields beginning
"X-" which contains certain words.  "Microsoft" would good.

Gene
[email-masked]

--

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From: A James Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:54:10 +0100 (BST)

If one were to do that then the problem would not be fixed in the long
term either... but thanks for the comment.

> AutoReply:", the mail is dropped else proceed.

A. James Lewis ([email-masked])
Open Source Specialists  http://www.entora.co.uk/
Tel: +44 (0)701 0723686  Fax: +44 (0)870 3214368

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 10:58:41 -0400

> always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".

this doesn't work, because the "out of office autoreply" messages are
not sent via the list server - they are sent directly to the author of 
the subject message. 

This is arguably another problem with such messages - they should probably 
go to the envelope return address (from the SMTP MAIL FROM command or the
return-path header field) rather than to the author's address (from the
From header field).

Keith

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From: Eric Rosen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:30:55 -0400

> return-path header field) rather than to the author's address (from the

That will get them sent to  the mailing list manager, who certainly will not
care to learn which of the thousands of mailing list members are on vacation
at any given time. 

Of  course, the  mailing list  manager  also does  not care  to learn  which
mailing list members  have exhausted their disk quotas  either, but hundreds
of mailservers are  very happy to tell him to please  send the message again
later.

RFC 1211  should be  required reading for  anyone developing a  mail server.
Perhaps then the developers would  at least take mailing lists into account;
it's pretty clear that most of  these systems are designed on the assumption
that mail is one-to-one.

With regard  to the  reply from  Microsoft, note that  the issue  of sending
vacation messages to  the Internet is completely orthogonal  to the issue of
sending vacation messages in response to a message from a mailing list.

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:39:55 -0400

> care to learn which of the thousands of mailing list members are on vacation

Actually, these days it's increasingly likely to get sent to a "bounced 
message parser" that tries to parse bounced messages and discover which
recipients' addresses are consistently failing.  That parser can also be
taught to ignore "out of office autoreplies".
 
> of mailservers are  very happy to tell him to please  send the message again

When the reporting MTAs use DSN format (and report the proper status codes
for this condition) the bounced mail parser can treat disk quota failures 
differently from "no such user" and other more permanent conditions, and 
avoid removing list recipients for temporary disk quota failures.

Keith

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From: Einar Stefferud <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 08:14:06 -0700

This solves the wrong problem.

The problem is that the autoreply out of office thingy responds 
directly to the submitter of the listserved message, not to the 
listserver, so there is no filterable contact between the autoreply 
and the list server.

Cheers...\Stef