On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 06:28:44PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I consider it to be an absolute requirement for any autoresponder to not
> reply to a message that isn't addressed to the recipient it is acting on
> behalf of. Anything else is just begging for the sort of exponential
> autoresponder meltdown that's happened on some mailing lists in the past
> (most notably faq-maintainers).
And that's part of why it's rate limited. By default, it will only
reply to a particular sender address once an hour, no matter how many
are sent. Hmmmm. Ezmlm uses a different recipient address each time
(but ezmlm will also add both a "Precedence: bulk" and a "Delivered-To:
mailing list ..." header).
I understand the argument you're making, and it's valid to a degree. If
you want to contribute a simple GPL-able RFC822 parser, I'll make it a
feature of my autoresponder. I did build a parser for nullmailer, but
it is inappropriate for this task -- to much overhead, and it also
reformats the lines as it goes. All this task needs is to be able to
extract the address from the header.
OTOH, I don't think it's as big a deal as you are making it out to be
with rate limiting. I consider rate limiting mandatory for
autoresponders, precisely due to this problem, as well as other issues
of abuse and annoyance.
> Otherwise, you'll end up sending
> autoreplies to mailing list traffic, which is an absolute no-no even if
> the mailing list isn't "properly" tagging messages with a Precedence
> header.
Or list-id, or mailing-list, or x-mailing-list, or x-ml-name. I should
actually add a test for ezmlm to check if a "Delivered-To:" line starts
with "mailing list ". If it's a program-based mailing list, it'll have
some kind of magic line. If it isn't, the rate limiting will stop
runaway loops (after an initial brief flury if there are large numbers
of members with autoresponders, which incidentally would be responding
to other kinds of list traffic anyways).
--
Bruce Guenter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://em.ca/~bruceg/
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