> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:hardware- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gary VanderMolen > Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2005 4:01 PM > To: The Hardware List > Subject: Re: [H] auto reply ? > > In this day and age of spoofed spam, Out-of-Office > autoresponders are not appropriate. If you receive spam > on that account, and the From address is some innocent Joe, > he will get the Out-of-Office notice. SpamCop has been > urging its reporters to report this type of misdelivered email > as spam. That can cause problems with your ISP. > > Gary VanderMolen > > ----- Original Message ----- > > how do I get outlook express to auto reply to incoming mail ? > > > > like when *out of office*
Not to pile on here, but I've got my own horror story of ineptitude and "Autoresponders." Years ago, I belonged to some mail list similar to this one, but it had significantly more members and was really active generating a lot of mail. Some guy in San Diego belonging to the list, took a long weekend off. Before he left his office, he flagged all his email accounts INCLUDING his mail list subscription to "autoreply" that he was out of the office and would not return until one early Tuesday morning.. You know where this is going.. Every message to the list generated an auto-response from this absent member that he was out of the office until Tuesday. And that message was, of course sent to every one else on the list. This was on a Sunday... He's not coming back until Tuesday... Early that Sunday morning I watched this debacle unfold over a period of 4 hours. Within that time frame, I received roughly 60 messages per hour, until about 2PM when I'd received over 200 messages, all from Mr. Weekend who could not be contacted in order to stop the flood of emails. Every list member received the same amount of mail. I calculated that by the time Weekend Boy returned to the office, every member would have received nearly 1,000 messages based on list traffic. Someone would write to the list, "Turn it off," that would generate an auto-reply. People would plead with the List admin and each email would in turn generate yet another auto-reply.. and on and on and on... The guy was sending the mail from some corporate hospital account in San Diego. For some reason that I can't recall, the List Admin was not able to stop the auto-replies from hitting every member's mailbox every few minutes. Can't recall why.. Finally, I had to make a series of desperate long distance calls to the hospital's IT Dept. in San Diego. Took about an hour. Finally someone, off duty, with appropriate authority was contacted, had to drive to the hospital, was able to access this members account and disable his autoresponder. What a nightmare.. Autoresponders.. Yuk... Bill
