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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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