Re: Auto-reply software

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From: Phil Pennock
Subject: Re: Auto-reply software
Date: 12:05 on 10 Jun 2004
On 2004-06-10 at 03:52 -0700, Ann Barcomb wrote:
> Today I'm getting mails from the vacation program of someone I don't
> know.  People who are sending something to a mailinglist generally
> don't care if someone else on the list whom they they have never spoken
> to is on vacation.
> 
> Vacation programs should not reply to mailinglist traffic.
> 
> Vacation programs should also keep some kind of log of people who have
> been notified about this vacation.  A reply once every 24-hours or so
> per person is quite enough; I don't need a reply for every single email.

Try reading the postmaster@ mailbox of a reasonably large ISP in
continental Europe.  This includes mail to mailer-daemon@.

Writing procmail filters for auto-replies is easy.  Up until you have to
handle with end-users customising their text, no common header, four or
five languages regularly seen and a dozen more also seen and streams of
auto-replies from customers, which typically at least are only in one or
two languages.

And no, I can't just filter on "^Subject: Re:" with lc($to) eq
'mailer-daemon', since some people really _do_ reply to mailer-daemon@,
not understanding the bounce messages, or wanting further help, and
those need to be seen and dealt with.

Cardinal Rule #1 for *ANY* program which sends email automatically:
stick in a header saying so.  I don't care if it's:
 X-Autogenerated: fred's big blob of code
or:
 Sender: autoreplybot@$domain
or anything else which is distinguishing, but deliberately making
auto-reples as indistinguishable from a real reply as possible is beyond
hateful; for an ISP postmaster, we're into hire-contract-assassin
hateful.

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