On Friday 02 July 2010, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Gene Heskett <[email protected]>
wrote:
>> Next question & off topic, how do we teach list members it is very poor
>> form to go off on holiday and set an out of office auto-reply pointed at
>> a mailing list, this will get me 5 or 6 of them in the next 10 minutes.
>> As they don't sort to the list because they address the sender, they
>> stay in my inbox, I am getting tempted to setup a procmail rule to
>> /dev/null the darned things.
>>
>> Please folks, do NOT setup an auto-responder that acts on mailing lists!
>> It is nothing more nor less than pure spam for us.
>
>This is worthy of its own thread. There are several thousand people
>on this list, so we'll never quite stamp out the scourge of
>autoresponders, but we can try.
>
>Often subscribers do not know that their employers are running a
>broken email server, so the best way to stop this is to kindly but
>firmly reply to the autoresponders. Re-subscribing with a gmail or
>yahoo address is always an option.
My take is that we should send a message to the violator telling him he has
been un-subscribed, and why with no implied rancor. And of course invite
them to resubscribe when they return from holiday, but to use a mail server
that isn't broken if they can. If they have issues with that as a hard and
fast rule, maybe they will take it up with their companies email
administrator, suitably armed and vociferous. ;-)
>There are a few people on this list from whom I regularly get
>autoresponses, and who I've asked repeatedly to resubscribe with a
>non-broken email address. Those folks (who are now in my killfile)
>should be ashamed of themselves.
Yes, I have .procmailrc rules that send some of that to /dev/null myself.
And until yesterday, it included one of my granddaughters who decided I was
a good candidate to add to her avon mailing list. :(
Yesterday I got a padded bag in the snail mail with some pix of my newest
Great Granddaughter. Good looking girl too, but she comes from a good
bloodline :), so I commented that rule out and sent her an email asking her
to please remove me from that list, and to please use a normal email account
to send me messages.
It should be pointed out, that I rarely expunge such things as I have no way
to adequately analyze the logs, so once they are in my kill list, they will
likely be there for a long long time. However at my level of contributions
of late, that may well be a never mind. Sigh...
>Dustin
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Declared guilty... of displaying feelings of an almost human nature.
-- Pink Floyd, "The Wall"
