Subject: creative use of vacation - is 'reply' action needed?

From: Cyrus Daboo <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 19:19:00 -0400

Hi folks,
I had a user post a problem about getting a sieve script to work properly. 
They were using vacation is a somewhat 'creative' way to try an implement 
an auto-reply feature. In this case they had three tests, each of which had 
a 'vacation :days 0' action associated with it:

1) Check for use of old email address and send reply telling correspondent 
to use the new one instead.

2) Check for text/html or multipart/alternative and send a reply telling 
correspondent to send plain text in future.

3) Check message size and if over some limit send a reply telling users not 
to send large messages in future.

Irrespective of the value of these specific tests I do wonder whether we 
need a proper 'reply' action to handle automated responses as opposed to 
rejects or vacation (which has restrictions on how it can be used). In this 
case the user was expecting multiple vacations to be sent if a message 
matched more than one of the tests, but of course that is not allowed. It 
would be possible to work around that using variables, but I really don't 
like vacation being used in this way.

Comments?

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

---

From: Tim Showalter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 18:06:31 -0700

Cyrus Daboo wrote:

> need a proper 'reply' action to handle automated responses [...]

The early Sieve drafts, in fact, had a reply command, but it was killed 
over an objection from John Myers, who was worried about giving users a 
way of sending replies without some limitations.

This type of automatic reply leads to sorcerer's apprentice problems. 
Of course, it's also really useful.

But that's why it's not there.

Tim