On Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:55:55 -0500, Tim Pierce wrote:
>On this list in particular, when you subscribe, the ezmlm confirmation
>message doesn't include any of the magic cookies traditionally
>associated with daemon messages (such as "Precedence: junk" or
>"qmail-request"). My vacation program replied, and apparently that
>was enough to confirm my subscription. The confirmation process is a
>sham if it can be fooled so easily by vacation programs and
>autoresponders.
Better that that. When I get a robot that autoreplies to an ezmlm list
I construct a unsubscirbe request for that user. The robot autoreplies,
and presto - no more vacation notices on the list ;-)
A confirmation request is not "junk" or "bulk". It is an ordinary
personal message. List messages and digests are "bulk". You shouldn't
vacation reply to "bulk".
In lieu of standards, MLMs have made up their own headers. Smart
vacation programs keep up with that. The ezmlm tell-tale header is
"Mailing-List". There is a proposal for a "List-ID:" header
(http://www.within.com/~chandhok/ietf/listid.shtml) which if generally
adopted would make things easier. rfc2369 is another one that hopefully
will be widely supported. You can catch either by looking for headers
"List-*" and choose not to reply.
Personally, I would use the To/Cc rule and send vacation messages only
if my address is in one of those 2 headers. For everything else (and
maybe more) the sender couldn't care less about my absence.
-Sincerely, Fred
(Frederik Lindberg, Infectious Diseases, WashU, St. Louis, MO, USA)
