[TriLUG] automated response

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 23:09, Tom Woods wrote:
> Not to defend the auto-respond to the maillist... But.....
> 
> For example;  I am required to set an out of office (OoO) when I am 
> going to be, well...  Out of the office.  Unfortunately, this will reply 
> to mailing lists as well as individulas.  However, it doesn't reply to 
> every email.  Once the OoO is sent to a recipient, that recipient is 
> tagged, and subsequent messages from that address are not replied to.  
> So, worst case scenario, the list gets one OoO message.

Well, actually, any responsibly written Out-of-Office message will never
do either of these two things:
	* Should never respond to messages when the recipient is not listed in
the To: or CC: field.  This should eliminate responses to mailing list
posts, and this procedure has been followed by the "vacation" program in
Unix for decades.
	* Should never respond to the "Reply-To:" field but rather the Sender:
address, or if there is no Sender:, the From:.  This will eliminate any
automatic responses going the list itself (instead they would go to the
message's poster).

Also, OoO agents should ignore messages with Precedence: set to "bulk"
or "list" which many mailing list software packages do.

E-mail is not a new thing... it was around long before the Web exploded
the popularity of the Internet.  There is really no excuse for software
developers who can't write a sane vacation autoresponder. 

--Jeremy

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