Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Izak Burger isbur...@gmail.com wrote: Stephen Vaughan stephenvaug...@gmail.com wrote: When will people learn not to set auto replies Nothing wrong with a proper auto-reply (one that does some decent caching, only replies once a day, avoids mailing lists and things with precedence: bulk, etc etc). The problem IMHO is that that is so hard to do. For example, our own auto-reply exim router (as requested by clients) checks for about 16 different headers in an attempt to avoid the most common non-human entities (mailman, roundup, eBay). So first prize is not having to use an auto-reply at all. Second prize is one that checks for common headers at the very least. If you don't have enough control over this (for example you're running exchange) you should either not subscribe that email address to a list, or you should not use the vacation feature. Considering the wide number of installs of Exchange, you'd think they'd eventually fix that *in* Exchange and not require any kind of addon or special user actions. As most things Microsoft, I'm surprised they make so much money off of this product. I understand it's difficult, but if they aren't willing to do the job, they shouldn't have signed up for the job. You sell mailserver software, you make it not do stupid things. Seems simple to me. I understand that it takes both sides to fix the problem: mailing list software to send the headers to be obvious that there shouldn't be an auto-reply, mailserver software to read the headers and therefore not auto-reply. FYI: I have to admin Exchange... and I hate it. Dusty -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Izak Burger isbur...@gmail.com wrote: our own auto-reply exim router (as requested by clients) checks for about 16 different headers On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 06:44, Dusty Wilson du...@hey.nu wrote: [snip] I understand that it takes both sides to fix the problem: mailing list software to send the headers to be obvious that there shouldn't be an auto-reply, mailserver software to read the headers and therefore not auto-reply. Bah!! Headers change over time. The simple and easy way to solve OoO problems is for vacation responders to only reply to From:/Sender: if (and only if) To: == $recipient. -Jim P. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:15:30 -0500 Jim Popovitch ya...@jimpop.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Izak Burger isbur...@gmail.com wrote: our own auto-reply exim router (as requested by clients) checks for about 16 different headers On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 06:44, Dusty Wilson du...@hey.nu wrote: [snip] I understand that it takes both sides to fix the problem: mailing list software to send the headers to be obvious that there shouldn't be an auto-reply, mailserver software to read the headers and therefore not auto-reply. Bah!! Headers change over time. The simple and easy way to solve OoO problems is for vacation responders to only reply to From:/Sender: if (and only if) To: == $recipient. This will not work since you got e.g. in Exchange virtuell recipients and I know people that really likes to register on ML etc. with these addresses on the one hand and setting these messages on the other side. To avoid such things the first step needs to be done on user side e.g. forcing them to create folders for lists and setting such rules only folder wide. But I doubt this will be very successful as well as you can educate everybody around. Cheers, Frank -- http://frank.uvena.de/en/ pgpRuQRcg6Zas.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 07:29, Frank Lanitz fr...@frank.uvena.de wrote: On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:15:30 -0500 Jim Popovitch ya...@jimpop.com wrote: Bah!! Headers change over time. The simple and easy way to solve OoO problems is for vacation responders to only reply to From:/Sender: if (and only if) To: == $recipient. This will not work since you got e.g. in Exchange virtuell recipients Virtual recipients shouldn't be a problem. The vacation responder (no matter where it exist in the process) shouldn't respond if To: != $recipient (virtual recipient or not). and I know people that really likes to register on ML etc. with these addresses on the one hand and setting these messages on the other side. I fail to see how that figures into the OoO equation. MLs *don't* want OoO replies. ;-) To avoid such things the first step needs to be done on user side e.g. forcing them to create folders for lists and setting such rules only folder wide. Huh!?!?!? -Jim P. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 6:40 AM, Jim Popovitch ya...@jimpop.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 07:29, Frank Lanitz fr...@frank.uvena.de wrote: On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:15:30 -0500 Jim Popovitch ya...@jimpop.com wrote: Bah!! Headers change over time. The simple and easy way to solve OoO problems is for vacation responders to only reply to From:/Sender: if (and only if) To: == $recipient. This will not work since you got e.g. in Exchange virtuell recipients Virtual recipients shouldn't be a problem. The vacation responder (no matter where it exist in the process) shouldn't respond if To: != $recipient (virtual recipient or not). Sometimes you have a situation where the recipient is f...@someplace.com, but that is forwarded to f...@someotherplace.com. His auto-responder is on someotherplace.com. His mailserver won't know that f...@someplace.com == f...@someotherplace.com and therefore would never send any auto-replies. And before you say they can just add the first-stop email address as an alias and have the responder smart enough to know that they are the same address, he might have been BCC'd into an email conversation and his mailserver would never know who the original recipient would have been. In that case, you'll have fewer auto-replies than you would have expected. I believe that the easiest thing is to say is Precedence: bulk in the header and hope for the best. If the auto-respond program (or mailserver, whatever) sees it, don't auto-reply. That's the only reliable thing I can think of, unless any mailservers on the way to your mailbox remove it (but why would they?). Dusty (sorry Jim for replying to you directly, my mistake) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
In article e2e2e5500901162250s61454d0bh76d73469bfaef...@mail.gmail.com you wrote: So first prize is not having to use an auto-reply at all. Second prize is one that checks for common headers at the very least. If you don't have enough control over this (for example you're running exchange) you should either not subscribe that email address to a list, or you should not use the vacation feature. Exchnage is observing the precedence: list header. What I had done is a exim smarthost with some filters (like if From: *-owner@) just adding the precendence header to stop auto answers to lists which do not set the headers right. Ultimately the problem is on the site of the list software (in the case of missing header). Gruss Bernd -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
In article 42670320901170344i4a7eb397g5522af4b38375...@mail.gmail.com you wrote: Considering the wide number of installs of Exchange, you'd think they'd eventually fix that *in* Exchange Exchanged does the right thing. Gruss Bernd -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
Jim Popovitch a écrit : On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Izak Burger isbur...@gmail.com wrote: our own auto-reply exim router (as requested by clients) checks for about 16 different headers On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 06:44, Dusty Wilson du...@hey.nu wrote: [snip] I understand that it takes both sides to fix the problem: mailing list software to send the headers to be obvious that there shouldn't be an auto-reply, mailserver software to read the headers and therefore not auto-reply. Bah!! Headers change over time. Headers don't change that often... Auto-responder authors should read RFC 3834. The simple and easy way to solve OoO problems is for vacation responders to only reply to From:/Sender: never reply to addresses found in headers. auto-resp should go to (original) envelope sender. I don't want to get an OoO if I post to a list (be that a real mailing-list or a simple list). if (and only if) To: == $recipient. of course, no auto-response should be sent if the mailbox owner is not found in the To: or Cc: headers. but parsing RFC 822 addresses is harder than parsing Precedence, Auto-Submitted headers, looking for typical list addresses in a few headers, ... etc. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Out of office replies
Stephen Vaughan stephenvaug...@gmail.com wrote: When will people learn not to set auto replies Nothing wrong with a proper auto-reply (one that does some decent caching, only replies once a day, avoids mailing lists and things with precedence: bulk, etc etc). The problem IMHO is that that is so hard to do. For example, our own auto-reply exim router (as requested by clients) checks for about 16 different headers in an attempt to avoid the most common non-human entities (mailman, roundup, eBay). So first prize is not having to use an auto-reply at all. Second prize is one that checks for common headers at the very least. If you don't have enough control over this (for example you're running exchange) you should either not subscribe that email address to a list, or you should not use the vacation feature. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
