Subject: Re[2]: sieve: vacation extension

From: "Chris Bartram" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 10:41:55 -0500

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:

> On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Chris Newman wrote:
>
> > You probably need a way to specify the delay between repeat notifications
> > if it's not the default one week.  I'm not sure how important this is.
>
> I'm going to have to add a general way of doing optional arguments to
> commands, I think, so it's easier for extensions.  There are a couple
> commands in the draft that could benefit from this.

It might be reasonable to suggest that no repeat messages get sent as long
as the "vacation" command/action is in effect. If it is changed/deleted-and-
added-back, then a new log is to be created

After all, a good vacation message should report the time period you're
not available for, and one of these per recipient should be plenty. I.e.
if the vacation message reports;

 "I'll be on safari from November 1,1997 til May 12, 1998"

I don't need to get a reminder of that once a week.

As a side note; perhaps a "recommendation" in the spec that implementors
"suggest" to users that they at LEAST provide a time period that they will
be unavailable in every vacation message. Kind of a "Note to implementors".
A "Sorry, I'm out of the office" message doesn't do much to help anyone.

> > I suggest you drop the recipient check, but instead use Sieve to do the
> > recipient check in examples.  The Sieve interpreter may not know all the
> > address forms for the script owner.
>
> I don't agree with this.  I'm afraid if users try to configure vacation,
> they'll blow it more times than they get it right.

I don't think there's a need to worry about the recipient check; if the
log ensures that ONLY ONE reply will ever be sent to a given return address,
at most you'll get one looped message to each of your various address
variations. It's probably alot easier just to deal with this than to worry
about rules for figuring out if you're really on a recip list... That's
never been doable in a reliable means anyway.

As long as only one reply goes to any sender, you won't have loops, and
that's the biggest problem you want to avoid with vacation programs (with
the mailing list reply's being second, and you've addressed that one). Even
on mail lists though, if you only ever send ONE reply, noone (usually) gets
too upset... it's the bums that send vacation responses back to EVERY list
posting that REALLY upset people! ;-)

                  -Chris Bartram

---

From: Tomas Fasth <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 01:07:59 +0100

> added-back, then a new log is to be created

I tend to agree with Chris B. about oneshot vacation notices. At least
it allow side-stepping the issues he described. It seem to me that
having a vacation notice repeated at some interval is more a function of
the original sender's individual memory refresh rate (which may vary
from time to time :) than anything else.

Is there any strong arguments for having repeated vacation notices?

A nice touch would be if the originator's MUA understood the vacation
notice good enough to politely make a reminder during the vacation
period each time the sender tries to submit another message. I guess
it's only a dream of mine...

-- 
Hälsningar/Regards

Tomas Fasth <[email-masked]>
Tel: +46-13-218-181 Cel: +46-708-870-957 Fax: +46-708-870-258
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