Jim Ramsay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I sent an email to a new person, someone who was not on my > whitelist, and I sadly forgot to set my X-TMDA to bare=append.
This isn't very reliable, as you can't always predict what address someone will reply from. Often their mail is forwarded to a different address. > They kindly replied to my email address, and of course got a > confirmation request as an answer. If you had used a 'dated' Reply-To, this wouldn't have happened. Tagged addresses are one great advantage TMDA has over vanilla challenge/response systems. All my non-whitelisted recipients receive a 'dated' Reply-To initially. I then add them to my whitelist if I think I'll correspond with them in the future. > From then on about 300 emails, I think, were sent back and forth > between my TMDA and his spam blocker -x application... Check your logs, but it should have been no more than 50. First, TMDA will perform many checks to try and detect if the message is another auto-response before it replies. Apparently, this application gave no such indication, which is pretty amazing. Because the world is filled with broken auto-responders, TMDA will send no more than 50 auto-responses (configurable) to the same address in one day. Take a look in your ~/.tmda/responses directory. You should see evidence of lots of responses to that address. > 2) Should I try to contact this person and let them know that their > email autoresponder is in violation of some standard for replying to > the From address instead of the envelope-sender? What standard is > it that they would be in violation of? The only standard is for MTA bounce messages. There isn't an official standard yet for auto-responders. However, there is the IETF Draft for Auto Responses[1] which does recommend they reply to the envelope sender address. This document also recommends using <> as the Return-Path to minimize mail loops. It also recommends adding an `Auto-Submitted' header to auto-responses for the same purpose---conscientious auto-responders will check for this before replying. TMDA also adds a `Precedence: bulk' header since many programs won't auto-respond to messages containing this header (though it's not in the draft). TMDA was doing these things before the IETF draft was written, because this common sense; things the author of an auto-responder should know. Lack of a published standard is no excuse for writing dangerous, mail-loop prone software. Footnotes: 1. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-moore-auto-email-response-00.txt _____________________________________________ tmda-users mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://tmda.net/lists/listinfo/tmda-users
