[Mimedefang] Re: Auto-responders

Bernd Petrovitsch bernd at firmix.at
Fri Sep 7 05:00:29 EDT 2007


On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 14:39 -0400, David F. Skoll wrote:
> -ray wrote:
> 
> > So while we're on the subject, what is the proper way for an
> > auto-responder to tell if this is a mailing list?  We use a procmail
> > script that pulls a vacation message from LDAP for our users.
> 
> There are several clues that an auto-response would be bad:
> 
> 1) Precedence: list
> 
> (Sendmail's "vacation" program won't send out a reply if it sees
> that header.)

And your auto-responder shouldn't respond to "List: bulk" (which is or
was also
used by majordomo IIRC and - if done properly - by newsletter senders).
And
"vacation" treats these the same way.

> 2) The various List-* headers (RFC 2919)
> 
> 3) The fact that your e-mail address does not appear in a To: or Cc: header.
> Again, "vacation" will not reply to message unless your e-mail address
> (or a set of aliases that you configure) appears in To: or Cc:.

4) And your autoresponder should not reply to every mail but once a week
or so.

	Bernd
-- 
Firmix Software GmbH                   http://www.firmix.at/
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