Quickmail is notorious for getting stuck in a reply-loop and clogging up the server. Any mail server can do it, but QM will crash much faster than most servers, from my experience.
When we did "away" auto-replies, we would limit them to our domain, or specifically name the domains to whom we wished to respond. We would also set a rule not to reply to an email if "Re:" was in the subject line. Unfortunately there's not a filter that says "If message is not junk" - only one that says "If message is junk" which doesn't help. Auto reply messages are dangerous for exactly the reason you described. A message received from a bogus address generates a reply, which then receives a bounce from the mail server, which generates another reply, and round and round it goes until the user's mailbox is completely filled and the mail server queue is overrun with bogus requests. We strongly "encouraged" our users to not use auto-replies, or if they did, not to set them up without letting us review them first. A little annoying to both us and the users, but better than coming in on a weekend to reboot the mail server because of a poorly constructed rule. Bryan On Jun 7, 2007, at 9:23 PM, Dan Crutcher wrote: > We use Apple's Mail program as our main email program at work. > Several employees have asked about setting up an auto-reply in Mail > to let people know that they will be out of the office for a few > days. A couple of them have succeeded in using Mail's rules to set up > a rudimentary auto-reply, but it hasn't worked out well. > > The main problem is that the auto replies are being generated when > junk mail comes in, and those replies usually bounces back to our > server, which then generates a MAILER DAEMON bounce message back to > the user and to the postmaster (me). I'd like to find a way to use > rules to auto-reply only to messages that are not designated as junk > mail, but I haven't been able to figure out a good way to do this. > > If it matters, we're using QuickMail Pro as our email server software. > > Any suggestions? > > Dan > > > > > _______________________________________________ > The next Louisville Computer Society meeting will > be June 26 at MacAuthority, 128 Breckinridge Lane. > Posting address: MacGroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup >
