On Mon, 5 Jun 2017, Steve Atkins wrote: > > On Jun 5, 2017, at 2:57 PM, Autumn Tyr-Salvia <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hello, > > > > Any idea what the impact of turning on the return-path for > > autoresponders would be? Colleagues tell me that the hosted mail > > service (Proofpoint) tells their clients not to use a return-path > > address for autoresponders because this is the RFC-correct way to do > > it. We could probably get them to make an exception here, but I'm > > curious if there is any real world impact to that. > > Using a null envelope sender significantly reduces the chance of > auto-responder storms. If they don't have realtime access to their mail > infrastructure to detect and mitigate those (which they don't) anything > they can do to reduce the likelihood of them happening is a good idea. I > think Outlook's OoO has decent-ish behaviour, but OoO vs a VERPing > autoresponder can still ruin your day.
If you add the following headers to your message, regardless of the envelope sender, you will also greatly reduce the chances of receiving a reply to your auto-response: Auto-submitted: auto-generated X-Auto-Response-Suppress: OOF Precedence: junk The first from RFC3834 (and that would be the best description of an "RFC-correct way to do it"). The second from Microsoft. The last based on observed behaviour of some systems (I think MS reference it too). Note also that if desgining your own autoreply system, it should make its decisions on whether or not to reply to a given message based on the above criteria; but you would prudently also prime it with a list of sender addresses to which you would not expect to want to send a reply. The most obvious ones would be "donotreply@" or "noreply@", but there are many others. You might consider addresses like "www-data@", "httpd", "bounce@", "root@" too. I've not looked at this area for many years now, but there are also some good tips on this page: https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-autoresponders Jethro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jethro R Binks, Network Manager, Information Services Directorate, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SC015263. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
